#malevolent has taken over my entire brain and life its all i can think about all the time always

[sou-pp]

GO LISTEN TO MALEVOLENT NOW!!!! GO DO IT DO IT NOW HURRY!!! (Untextured version + closeups under text)

[late-to-the-magnus-archives]

Snippet of CORRUPTED - Magnus Archives x Malevolent fic

Danny Stoker died trying to keep a weird, cursed book away from some very bad people. Tim opened the book, and has been thrust into an entirely new world.

A snippet in which Tim is growing increasingly concerned about whatever has taken up residence in his head.

And in which some of that being's nature begins to slip through...

-------------

A few kabobs later, Tim feels significantly better. Stable blood sugar is a hell of a thing.

He still hates not being able to see. It’s awful. It’s terrifying.

But John is doing a really good job of keeping him safe, and as long as Tim tells himself this will be over soon, he’s all right.

He has to be all right.

Tim also tells himself not to think too much about Bouchard’s description of John.

That was… not a safe-sounding creature. And maybe Tim is just being some sort of speciesist, but he doesn’t know how to approach the topic at all.

It brings to mind again the question of why John had been bound in a book held by humans.

It brings to mind again that John is manipulative, and is controlling. And Tim is more than fine with both of those things in certain circumstances, but depending on the guy to stay alive is definitely not one of them.

It brings to mind the question: what else is in that book that John cannot see?

Tim believes Bouchard. Something else is in there.

He wonders if it’s safe in the backpack. “Hey, John?”

The shop we need is about twenty steps ahead and to your right. Yes?

“Is the book safe? Should I, like, wrap it in my belt, or something, so it doesn’t open in the bag?”

It won’t matter if it opens in the bag. It could fall down a cliff and flutter completely agape, revealing its perverseness to the seagulls, and nothing would happen. It must be opened by a living, sentient being.

“Wow. If they could go that far, you’d think they’d put some kind of lock on it, yeah? A safeword, or something.”

John sounds amused. You mean a fail-safe? Or a password, perhaps?

“Sure, whatever. Still, that’s good to know. Wouldn’t want to release Cthulhu in the middle of London.”

No, we wouldn’t want to do that, says John with absolutely no inflection at all. Store to your right, now.

Oh, that wasn’t spooky. Nope!

Tim sighs. It’s still early morning, he tells himself. There’s safety in that, even if he can’t see the daylight. 

John doesn’t have a body, Tim tells himself. He’s not Cthulhu, either, since that is an old-timey story by a crazy dead racist. (Speciesist, Tim’s brain adds.) 

He’s safe, he tells himself. It’s not like weird gray-skinned monsters are going to come at him on a busy London street.

John directs him into the store, which turns out to be a health-food, raw sugar, vitamins-the-size-of-thumbs kind of place. There, John directs him to buy just… stuff.

A block of salt. Six small candles, unscented. Various herbs. A hand-built clay bowl. Matches. Distilled water. Rubbing alcohol. 

Then they leave, and find a hardware store, and John directs him to buy a length of rope, a hammer, six cleat hooks, one plastic pipe, and one copper.

Tim has played games and read books and seen movies, and cannot for the life of him figure out what all of this is supposed to do.

Very good, Tim, says John, who has obviously figured out Tim likes to be praised. Now we need a place to cast. I do not suggest your apartment, as we need to keep that location completely separate. 

“Cast?”

Yes.

“I’m going to cast a spell?”

We are.

Tim’s not sure about that. “You… how are you going to be casting it?”

In the same way that your thoughts can sink into me, my power can just barely be lent to you - not much, or it would hurt you, or break your mind, and I have no need to do that.

The unspoken right now might only be in Tim’s head.

He hopes it’s only in his head.

“You’re going to make me magical for five minutes, or something?”

Less time than that. As I said, I don’t want to burn you out, and unless you have an affinity for magic, using it would harm you with longer exposure.

“So I don’t have an affinity for magic?”

Well, we don’t know, do we? Have you ever tried to cast it?

Tim snorts. “Have I ever tried to cast the thing I didn’t think existed twelve hours ago? Yeah, no.”

Then we’re going to find out, and I’d rather that not result in your harm. Now, as I said: we need a place where we won’t be disturbed.

Tim thinks for a moment. His heart pings painfully, and he has to rub his eyes dry.

Tim?

“Sorry, just… Danny. Got into exploring derelict buildings not too long ago. It’s what I thought he was still doing when he showed up ranting about cultists, but… I'm pretty sure he knew some places. We need to go back to my flat and get his laptop. For his pictures, and… all of that.”

Mister Smooth is in the metaphorical building. Of course, Tim. Whatever we need to do. I’m sorry for your loss.

“Look, don’t… don’t do that.”

Do what? Even smoother.

“You’ve got one hell of a set of pipes, and we both know it, but you whip out that voice every time I get upset. And I don’t think you’re doing it to comfort me.”

Why else would I be doing it, Tim?

It’s not a flat tone. He’s not angry. He’s testing the waters.

Tim doesn’t want him angry. He needs him to fucking navigate. “I don’t know. I just… I don’t want to be manipulated. I know I’m all kinds of fucked right now, okay? Fragile. So maybe I’m being prickly, but…”

I have no reason to wish you any harm, Tim. If I have chosen a manner of speaking to you with the goal of it being effective, perhaps you should ask yourself what effect I’m trying to achieve.

Huh. That was… kind of hard to just argue with. Tim is still sure in his gut that it’s another form of bossiness, but the goal of the bossiness wasn’t one he’d considered. “Hm.”

Shall we go back to your apartment? John isn’t pushing.

Suspiciously not pushing. Maybe he wants Tim to think about it.

Or maybe Tim's still feeling paranoid because of the spooky Eye god. “Fuck that place,” Tim mutters.

What? Ah - the Institute?

“It’s still messing with my head.”

There’s a pause. I wonder if we can block him.

“Who, Bouchard?”

It might be unwise. We could anger his god. But… it might be satisfying, too.

“We can do that?”

Let’s complete this conjuring first. I need to see how you take it - if you’re in any way harmed, Tim, we won’t be doing it again.

There’s a weird little thrill in him - the same kind of thrill he had when he realized he could outrun everyone else in track and field, the same little thrill when he realized he had a skill for editing almost no one around him possessed, the same little thrill (though a touch more complicated) when he realized he did, indeed, like all the genders in whatever configuration they came.

“You think I could do magic?” he says.

I don’t know yet. We’ll see.

Tim suddenly snickers. “Are you telling me I could actually be a wizard called Tim?”

John laughs.

It’s a real laugh, not a chuckle - a deep and genuine guffaw.

It’s also possibly the wickedest sound Tim has ever heard. There’s something terrible in it, like it’s often cruel, and it feels like a sound so bottomless he could fall in it, screaming, forever.

That reference is far too old for you, isn’t it? John finally says. 

“Do not tell me you’re familiar with Monty Python.”

And why not?

“It… it’s just weird, is all.” Unnerving. “How the hell long have you been on Earth, anyway?”

Oh, Tim… the things I could tell you.

And then John doesn’t.

“Okay,” says Tim, slowly. “So. Um.” Choice time: pursue that spooky line of questioning, or just go the hell home?

“Let’s go the hell home,” he says. “Need the bus number?”

No, I remember. Turn around. The closest stop is behind us.

John remembered that?

Had he already been looking for a bus stop?

Tim knows that if he’d been in the position of having to navigate through some dude’s eyes, he wouldn’t have been focusing on surroundings enough to catch that.

John is… scary smart, actually.

Combining that with the manipulative tendencies, the bossiness, the obviously good memory…

Tim?

“Sorry. Right.”

It has to be obvious he’s lost in thought, but John doesn’t push.

Of course he doesn’t. It wouldn’t be scary smart to do that, would it?

A few more steps. Stop. It says the bus should be along in about fifteen minutes.

Since last night, Tim’s been running from cultists, from gray-skinned claw-monsters, from an eyeball god and its creepy priest.

For the first time, he genuinely wonders if he’s in serious danger from John, too.

Some of that must be getting through. Water in porous stone. You’re going to be all right, Tim. 

“You don’t know that.”

How about this, then: you’ve shown yourself worthy of reward, throughout this. I will see to it that you receive it.

Funny. After all the casual humor and the relatability of shared media, John has casually dropped an abjectly alien and terrifying sentence.

“Glad… to know I’ve fit your standards?” Tim says after a moment. “Though there’s not a lot you can do to make that happen.”

Not yet. But the time is coming soon when I will.

Oh, fuck me, Tim thinks. “Um… how?”

Would you like to know why I was in that book?

Would he? “Yes!”

Home. We do this conjuring. If you handle it well, Tim, I’ll show you.

Was it his imagination, or was something… bad about the way he said that? “And if I don’t handle it well?”

Then I will just tell you.

And that would disappoint John.

Tim exhales slowly. I am in so much trouble, he thinks.”So this conjuring will find some power to help us.”

That’s the idea.

Then they really had to do it. It was that or go back to Bouchard, and Tim would rather eat a rat. “All right.”

Bus.

They’re both quiet on the way home.

Without meaning to, Tim dozes until they’re about twenty minutes from his stop. 

John lets him rest.

[ernmark]

(Finally) reacting to What Lies Beyond

So first off-- amazing episode. Absolutely incredible.

I've only listened to it once so far, but it's the kind that really probably should be listened to at least twice to understand it in its full context, which is delightful.

Even more delightful is the way the Aurinko Crime Family-- which Juno consistently refers to as his family , which makes my heart melt-- can communicate between each other so effortlessly. They know exactly what's in and out of character, exactly how to communicate essential information, exactly what it means and how and when to enact it. And it's especially wonderful to see them so utterly in sync with each other because we've seen all the conflict and work that came before this point. It makes the payoff so very sweet.

We've been led to believe a lot of things-- that Peter is hiding in the space between the walls, that he's the one who sent the distress signal that brought Dark Matters to their door to crash the wedding, etc. I'm not so convinced about that last bit, but I'll return to that point later.

One big detail sticks out in my brain, though:

We've been told before now that humans have never found living aliens. Plenty of evidence, sure-- artifacts and fossils, but they've always been extinct.

And all the while, that's been a question mark in the back of my mind-- all of them? Really? Not a single sapient species managed to survive in the entire galaxy?

Well. Now we know why. Exactly why.

Because they've got a neighbor who will systematically annihilate intelligent life.

Holy Armageddon, Batman.

I want to know where that particular thread is leading, because. Um.

Which leads me to a guess:

The Curemother Prime is not a thing or a predator, but an entity. A person, if that word can appropriately apply to something that is so far removed from our conception of humanoids.

One that apparently has intelligence and agency, enough to recognize the difference between intelligent and non-intelligent life, and to differentiate between cells doing benevolent things for that intelligent life (like e. coli in the intestines, benign body cells), and those same cells doing malevolent things for the same intelligent life (like e. coli elsewhere in the body, cancer cells).

But beyond that, it doesn't like when people argue about it. It does, however, like Juno. It responds to him. It recognizes him as different. Because he, too, has been telepathic, at least for a while? Because the Martian DNA still floating around in his blood marks him as nonhuman-- and therefore, distinct from its kidnappers?

Because that's the vibe I'm getting from this entity. It's been locked up, it doesn't like people arguing about it, it wants people to feel better and will do what it can to make them feel better.

I think it's a child-- or the rough equivalent of one for its kind.

And it has been kidnapped, poked and prodded, used as a weapon, it's had these weird alien grown-ups shouting at each other about it, and finally it's been locked up all by itself in an incredibly scary place full of weapons and violence.

And then it's rescued by the Aurinko family, among whom is the first not-quite-human that it's interacted with in a very, very long time.

And also the first absolutely-not-human.

Because we've been told that Kabert weren't planning to do an intelligent AI storyline, because that's just not the story they want to tell. But the Ruby 7 is pretty damn close to intelligent. So intelligent-- so bizarre, in fact-- that Dark Matters threw it at M'Tendere to figure out how the heck it works. So bizarre that Jet just kind of shrugs and lets it heal on its own-- you know, the way you would let a human body rest and regenerate itself after an injury.

Therefore: maybe it came from the same place as the Curemother Prime. Maybe it's not the same kind of entity, but a similar non-organic lifeform all its own.

And jumping off that theory: maybe the Ruby 7 is what sent the distress signal to Dark Matters once the Curemother Prime was retrieved. Maybe it ran the numbers and decided that Dark Matters being there was the best course of action-- maybe to give the Aurinko Family the full context of the Curemother Prime's origins, or maybe to put them in a better position to do something else.

I'm spitballing theories here, because it's been a while: The Ruby 7 is a good judge of skill and character, especially regarding people it's spent a lot of time with, so I think it would have taken for given that they'd find a way to get one over on Dark Matters, especially during this time of sloppy transition. But even though they've escaped, Dark Matters is going to be hot on the Aurinko Family's tail.

Now consider what would happen if Peter's creditors (who haven't shown their faces in quite a while, despite multiple reminders) were to catch up with him right about now. Right now, when the Carte Blanche is practically dragging Dark Matters in its wake.

I'm sure that whoever it is that's clever enough to know Peter's name, scary enough to have him in this kind of debt, and powerful enough to make betraying Juno and his newfound family seem like a viable option-- I'm sure that kind of organization would be a very tempting distraction for Dark Matters right about now.

Just something to think about.

[kurowrites]

Snow - Chapter 3

Entire fic. AO3.

---

When Wei Ying wakes up, it’s dark outside. He checks his phone, wondering if he somehow slept away the entire night, but it’s still evening. He slept for maybe two hours. The nap has worked wonders though; he definitely feels better now. Reaching for his new dressing gown, he slips out of bed and follows the light coming through the crack of his bedroom door. He finds Lan Zhan seated at his rickety kitchen table that also doubles as Wei Ying’s work desk, reading a book about… art history, it seems.

Lan Zhan looks up when Wei Ying enters the kitchen, and puts the book aside when Wei Ying comes closer. He doesn’t say anything, but Wei Ying can feel him take in Wei Ying’s appearance, checking his current condition. He smiles at Lan Zhan, assuring him that he feels much better now.

“If you are hungry, I will make dinner,” Lan Zhan offers.

Wei Ying unashamedly loves being fed, so he accepts the offer without a second thought. He doesn’t even care what Lan Zhan will make; it’s food. Delicious, delicious food. He watches as Lan Zhan prepares all the ingredients and begins to cook, and it’s clear after only a few minutes that Lan Zhan definitely knows his way around a kitchen. In fact, after only two days, he probably knows his way better around Wei Ying’s kitchen than Wei Ying himself. Wei Ying has never been a good cook, and people generally tend to react to his attempts at cooking with horror.

Lan Zhan, on the other hand, moves as smoothly as a professional cook, clearly following a set sequence of steps that he has memorized, no need to look it up on the internet as Wei Ying would have to. When the pot of what might or might not be some kind of beef stew is happily bubbling on the stove and all cutting boards and other tools have been cleaned away, Lan Zhan turns towards Wei Ying with an invariably serious expression on his face.

“You shouldn’t let strangers into your apartment,” he says.

It’s a complete non-sequitur that makes Wei Ying laugh.

Did he really wait to say this until the pot of food is almost ready to be eaten?

“That’s rich, coming from you of all people,” Wei Ying tells him, but not in a mean way.

Lan Zhan is right, obviously. You never really know what people are, and some of them are very good at hiding the ugly parts inside. Some people will show you a gentle smile and then beat you mercilessly once you put yourself in their power. It’s always a gamble, unpredictable and dangerous. But Wei Ying wouldn’t be here if he didn’t know how to trust. He would’ve never made it to this place if he hadn’t taken Jiang Fengmian’s hand that day and believed him when he said he was going to make Wei Ying a part of his family.

There’s something about Lan Zhan that makes him want to trust, just like he trusted Jiang Fengmian. There’s a solidity, a steadiness to Lan Zhan that makes him seem implicitly trustworthy. At the same time, even here in this kitchen, in a setting as domestic as cooking a meal, he looks somehow removed from the mundane, from earthly concerns and malevolent scheming. Wei Ying feels that if he can’t trust this man, there is little hope left in humanity.

Sure, the beautiful face doesn’t hurt. But Wei Ying is absolutely sure he could pick Lan Zhan out of a line-up of identical people blindfolded simply through his presence. He doesn’t think he’s ever been drawn to another person more. It’s hard not to reach out and touch him when he’s standing right there, looking at Wei Ying with an intent that gives him pleasant shivers.

He then remembers that Lan Zhan already let Wei Ying touch him once, without complaint. So, he decides it’s silly to repress his desire and just touch. He steps forward until he’s right in Lan Zhan’s space, until he can lean against Lan Zhan’s tall figure and sink his fingers into the softness of Lan Zhan’s white jumper again. He rises onto his toes, his lips nearly touching Lan Zhan’s ear.

Oh god, Lan Zhan smells really good, he notices.

“But you wanted me to let you in so very, very badly,” he whispers in Lan Zhan’s ear and laughs quietly when his impertinence isn’t answered by a scolding, but by a slight shiver.

“If I had met you at a bar or a club, I might have taken you home, regardless,” he continues his tease.

It has the desired effect. Lan Zhan’s eyes flash, and there’s suddenly a hand squeezing his hip, possessive. The next moment, Lan Zhan relaxes, and the mask of impenetrability slips back on his face. But the slip of control was enough for Wei Ying to understand. He leans in closer, placing a soothing kiss on Lan Zhan’s cheek.

Ah, so soft.

Lan Zhan doesn’t need to know that Wei Ying has never taken any person home from a bar or club, or that his love life mostly consists of playful flirting that he can never bring himself to turn into more. A little jealousy might be just what Wei Ying wants right now.

“Is that what you want, Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying asks with a mischievous little grin. “Do you want me?”

Lan Zhan doesn’t answer, but the grip on Wei Ying’s hip gets tighter.

“I can be yours if you want to,” Wei Ying whispers against Lan Zhan’s lips. Feeling courageous, he lets his tongue flicker across Lan Zhan’s lips; a tiny lick.

The next thing he knows, he’s being kissed within an inch of his life. Lan Zan presses him against the countertop and devours him, and wow. That’s really, really hot. Wei Ying wasn’t actually hoping for such an enthusiastic response, but it’s not like he’s complaining. On the contrary, he’s quite happy that he read Lan Zhan right. That carefully calm and collected exterior apparently hides a brightly burning fire. Wei Ying is delighted.

Lan Zhan eventually draws back, and he fixes Wei Ying’s dishevelled appearance with a frown.

“Do not tease,” he says. “You are still recuperating.”

Then he turns back towards the pot still simmering on the stove, and Wei Ying remembers belatedly that they’re in the kitchen and are preparing dinner. He was so immersed in Lan Zhan that he completely forgot about that part. Luckily for him, Lan Zhan seems to have his rational brain still turned on, and there will be no emergency calls for a kitchen fire made tonight.

Lan Zhan finishes the preparations for the meal, and before long, they both sit down for dinner at Wei Ying’s rickety kitchen table. The table has been cleared of the usual mountains of papers Wei Ying tends to let accumulate, and Wei Ying spots them, neatly ordered, on an empty spot on the kitchen counter. Lan Zhan is really good at cleaning up his messes, he thinks to himself. He wished were half as good.

During the meal, Lan Zhan is as taciturn as he’s been so far, concentrating on eating rather than conversing with Wei Ying. Wei Ying watches him eat and lets his mind wander for a little. Mostly in the direction of how he managed to reel in an ideal man like Lan Zhan with barely any effort. He coughed on him, for heaven’s sake. Wei Ying would get upset if Jiang Cheng coughed in his face, and he would die for Jiang Cheng.

Once they have both finished eating, Lan Zhan raises from his chair and starts cleaning up. When Wei Ying tries to get up as well to help, he finds himself gently pushed back into his seat. Lan Zhan tucks a loose lock of Wei Ying’s hair behind his ear and shakes his head.

“You still need to rest.”

With that, he turns towards the sink and starts washing the dishes, putting everything away, and even cleans the kitchen itself until everything is absolutely spotless. Wei Ying marvels at it. He doesn’t think his kitchen has looked this good ever since he moved in here. Everything is in its place, and all the counters are spotless.

When Lan Zhan is finally done, he shows a hint of insecurity for the first time. He stands in the middle of the kitchen, his gaze flickering over to Wei Ying for a moment

“I should go home,” he says quietly.

Wei Ying pouts at him. He doesn’t even have to pretend. He knows he should be more careful, but he enjoys Lan Zhan’s presence, the way Lan Zhan pays attention to him. He wants Lan Zhan to stay.

He might be getting spoiled already. But he’s still a little sick, a little tender from the fever; that will have to be his excuse.

“You’re going to leave me alone?” he whines.

Lan Zhan hesitates, looking towards the kitchen door that leads into the narrow hallway of his apartment that only consists of three room: the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom.

“There is only one bed.”

“It’s a large one,” Wei Ying suggests slyly.

Come on, he thinks at Lan Zhan desperately. I know you want to.

That makes Lan Zhan frown. “I told you not to let strangers into your home.”

“And I told you I might have taken you home with me anyway,” Wei Ying reminds him. “So you would have ended up in my bed one way or another. Unless you would’ve preferred me in your bed, of course.”

There’s that flash of Lan Zhan’s eyes again, the way his gaze zeroes in on Wei YIng. Wei Ying glories in the expression. It feels exhilarating, somehow, to know that this beautiful, rigid man wants him.

It feels too good to be true. He doesn’t want to let go. Not yet.

“Is that a no?” Wei Ying asks, but he knows that he’s won. For now.

Lan Zhan sighs deeply, as if he’s asking himself how he got himself into this ridiculous, impossible situation.

But he pushes Wei Ying towards the bathroom to brush his teeth and picks up his own pretty leather briefcase to fish a small travel set out it, containing a toothbrush and some other products. When Wei Ying eyes it suspiciously, he tells him that he always carries it with him. Wei Ying sticks his nose into it curiously, and finds hand disinfectant, antiseptic, band-aids, and other useful things. This man is prepared for everything. It’s a little impressive, and also a little hot.

And this hot man ends up in Wei Ying’s bed. He borrows one of Wei Ying’s usual sleep shirts he generally wears in lieu of an actual pyjama. The t-shirt with the logo of a metal mand looks both hilariously out of place and offensively good on Lan Zhan. A very prim and proper rebel, with a figure that’s nothing to sneeze at. No, these shoulders alone are dangerous to Wei Ying’s health.

As Lan Zhan finally lays down next to Wei Ying, Wei Ying can’t help but feel a shiver of delicious excitement. He actually got this man into his bed.

Wei Ying wriggles closer, unable to stop smiling. He loots for Lan Zhan’s arm and wraps it around himself when he finds it. Lan Zhan lets it happen without comment, and even adjusts his hold on Wei Ying, pulling him closer until his nose is almost pressed to Lan Zhan’s clavicle. Wei Ying doesn’t complain. After all, Lan Zhan smells amazing.

Lan Zhan buries his own nose in Wei Ying’s hair and stays like that. After a few minutes, his breath evens out, his hold on Wei Ying’s middle growing slack. Wei Ying is impressed. He fell asleep just like that, a strange person in his arms. Wei Ying could do anything to him right now, he thinks with glee. He pokes Lan Zhan once, experimentally. Lan Zhan shifts, and snuffles in Wei Ying’s hair, but doesn’t wake.

It’s cute.

Fuck.

Wei Ying would feel bad waking Lan Zhan up again, so he leaves him be.

Wei Ying is usually more of a night owl, but he’s still not entirely recovered from his fever, and Lan Zhan’s smell and warmth are better sleeping pills than anything he’s ever tried.

He follows Lan Zhan only a short while later.

[botslayer]

Fantasy and Scifi “Racism,” an opinion piece:

This whole thing is gonna be a slurry of politics, hot takes, nerd shit, some pictures to make it not a snooze fest on the eyes, and me asking the lot of ya to consider both sides of an argument. If you have a problem with any of that, please leave. All that said, let's get on with it: Let’s take three gentlemen for an example. One is from Poland. One is from Angola, one is from South Korea. What does that tell us about them? We can infer averages. For example, The average Polish man’s height is about five feet, ten and a half inches, so the Polish gentleman’s height might be in that ballpark. A very well known Korean dish is Kimchi, so it is moderately safe to assume the Korean man has, at some point, eaten it. Two of Angola’s largest provinces happen to be “Moxico” and “Cuandocubango” and one of it’s most populated is called “Huambo” So it would be a moderately safe bet to assume the man from Angola is from one of those areas. Their countries/continents of origin don’t directly tell us much though. Hell, we could be dealing with a Polish little person, a Korean who has bafflingly never had kimchi and an Angolan from Lunda Sul. We also don’t know about their outlooks, their lives, mental conditions they might have. Hell, we may not know what race these guys are. There’s a slim chance the Angolan Gentleman is Chinese (1.4% of the country’s population) Or that the Polish guy is ethnically German. We just don’t know. What we do know for a fact is that they’re all human men. They have (most likely) similar psychology, anatomy, dietary need to not starve to death or dehydrate, etc. And that’s about it. Now let’s take a sample from three fictional species off the top of my head: Starting with a Furon from Destroy all humans.

Now, Furons are pretty much universally shorter and physically weaker than humans, so it is safe to assume our single Furon has these qualities. He's also likely a psychic as that's a common attribute of his people. Also common would be the perception of humans as cattle, his possession of advanced force field technology is also pretty much a guarantee. Outliers exist and all that but something worth mentioning: This Furon is a Furon. In other news: The sky is blue, yeah? The problem is though: The Furons are very much not humans. And there aren't too many "races" in that equation, either. Just the populace of the Furon Homeworld. It's also worth noting that we don't actually know what Furons eat, their water intake any of that. We know only so many details but with just those, it's obvious that Furons and humans are too damn different. For species two, let's look at Mind Flayers from DnD.

Mind Flayers, otherwise known as "Illithids," are generally humanoid creatures born through a process known as "Ceramorphosis." See, Illithids are anatomically asexual, as in, they self inseminate and produce eggs from their mouths. They put the eggs in with an entity called "The Elder brain" which is a conglomerate of other Illithid brains, the tadpoles eat one another or get eaten by the brain for about ten years before being selected and implanted into a sentient creature (Humans, elves, etc) From there, the tadpole eats the brain of that creature, replacing it with its own and slowly altering their anatomy until you get a malevolent microcthulhu with potent psychic powers and the need to eat one entire human-level brain every month. Mindflayers start their lives as parasites that literally consume your entire sense of self and mutate you into an unrecognizable husk with a cephalopod for a face. And they have the gall to consider humans lesser? How bloody dare... an entirely separate species of sentient creatures come to that conclusion. For our last example, let's talk about a species from a setting best described as Technomystical: The Skakdi from Bionicle.

For those who don't know what that species is, The Piraka from the 2006 toyline are all examples of Skakdi. Now, Skakdi look, and they are, absolutely brutal. For example, the species was beset by an army of large and lethal creatures called "Zyglak" after becoming what they are today, the lot of them being mutants. The Zyglak were completely wiped out. Skakdi are savage in the best of ways. They aren't just beasts, they're berserkers with the powers of the elements, however, it does require two of them to activate such powers. Thing is though, they're all like that. The entire species has been mutated from what it once was into a legion that knows little else other than slaughter and subjugation of others... Generally speaking, at least. The problem with all three of these species, or "Races" (As I do NOT prefer to call it), and in fact most species from almost all settings is that they're a monolith. Illithids, for example, generally all follow the same societal structure, living in large groups wherever they can under the "guidance" (as in "Hivemind link") of elder brains, some strike out on their own, but for the most part, they live under elder brains, no matter where in the world they are. There aren't competing Illithid Nations or sub-species with things that makes them distinctly Korean or Aztec inspired unless the DM adds those things. And even then, when settings do that, say, Warhammer, there are some groups that are a national proxy (The Empire is Germany, Bretonnia is France, etc) and then some proxies are just an entire species. (See the Lizard Men, who went from Native American-coded to Aztec over the course of some years.) Adding to these things is a slight elephant in the room. Alignment systems. See, humans in games like DnD can be anything from neutral evil to chaotic good, true neutral to lawful evil, etc. But then some species are stuck as inherently good or evil or inherently lawful or chaotic. The problem with saying that about a sentient species is that it smacks a bit of actual, real racism/racist ideas. The idea that this group of beings that just lives differently to the rest of us is inherently almost anything is clearly bad, right? Well... Maybe if we didn't do that IRL, that would feel more genuine. The hell am I on about?

We, as humans, understand that other species of everything from primates to insects are naturally more aggressive, more gentle, more poisonous, more endowed with certain senses, etc. All except for other groups of humans. Because save for pigments of skin, general height, and elements of culture, pretty much all human groups are the same.  That said: Point me to the the race of humans more naturally endowed with psychic powers. Or the human race that can only go on by implanting itself in other humans and slowly making people lose their minds until only they take over said body. 

I can show you examples of animals doing the whole “Eating you from the inside out” thing. But not humans. Hell, even cannibals have to get a cut off of ya first. But that’s just how beings like Mind Flayers operate. I can show you examples of more aggressive insectoid life vs ones that just want to be left alone. Generally speaking, a wasp is more aggressive than a ladybug. But that’s because they evolved differently to one another. Like Mind Flayers have from elves. Or like Furons have from Blisk. Or like The Skakdi had from Matoran, even before being mutants. Does that make them (wasps) “Evil” though? Well... No. The problem is that wasps took on the various scary attributes they did because that was the hand nature played for them. A wasp does not choose to start life by eating it’s way out of a living tarantula and then spending the rest of it angrily defending whatever it considers to be it’s “territory” only to lay another one of its kind into another tarantula, that’s just what the little bastards do without thinking because that’s how they adapted to the world. I would say though that Furons are evil. They view an entire species they consider intelligent (Even “Loosely”) as cattle to harvest DNA from and otherwise use as playthings, killing them en masse just for shits and giggles. Mindflayers, I would say much the same of unless they willingly find violent/genuinely harmful examples of intelligent life that will do the world no good and then eat only them. But no, these freaks bred an entire species of creatures to have massive brains and be super passive just to make eating their brains easier. That’s pretty damn evil.

(Pictured above, an Oortling from Forgotten Realms 2e) Creatures like the Krill from Seth Macfarlane’s “The Orville” believe all other sentient species are lesser than them. The galaxy is for them and them alone to conquer and do with as they please. Such is the Will of their god Avis. They started stabbing a human head live in front of other Krill in an episode as part of their religious practices. But then the species has some nuance. This fundamentalism and extremism is how they cope with being so damn small in the face of an uncaring, unfeeling void. So are the Krill evil? No. They’re afraid. 

Coming back to the Skakdi, They started out as relatively peaceful until a creature from the Makuta species showed up and mutated the lot of them into the magabadasses they are now. All of them now have, fighting skill equal to, if not greater than most Toa, and even elemental powers. But they aren’t all evil. They’re just aggressive, angry, and furthermore, also probably hurting. A peaceful existence was just taken from these poor bastards, all they know now is conflict with one another. So are the Skakdi evil? No. Some of them might be but it ain’t because they’re Skakdi. 

See, Skakdi and Krill are important things to remember here because they, while still being monolithic as cultures, have a little more depth than just the myriad ways in which they’re evil bastards.  But Mind Flayers? Not really. Not unless the DM adds that. Furons? I mean... Sometimes they become friends or mate with humans but not usually. And what of the big old elephant in the room? The Orcs of D&D? Orcs as a species were recently described as only having limited capacities for things like empathy... If raised outside the violent and chaotic madness that is living with other orcs.

This is the thing that sparked this post, so I will now, at the near end, address it specifically: People find the wording here to be reminiscent of things actual racist propaganda and ideas perpetuated about pretty much specifically black people as I understand it. Which, I genuinely wouldn’t know. I never really grew up around that stuff and I do my best to avoid racists/racism in my day-to-day. But to me? This just makes a depressing kind of sense. The species that evolved/was made or whatever to be this big, hulking set of warrior badasses. has a limited ability to understand what it is to be the other guy. Seems legit. Especially when you remember that even if Orcs are just another group of primates, they aren’t human and would likely have psychological differences to humans. 

This is a baby chimpanzee. Look at it. It’s cute. You want one, don’t you? Well... That’s not advised, honestly. Chimps can be fucking monsters. Don’t know what I mean? A. I’m surprised. B. Just google “Chimpanzee attacks” if you have the stomach for it. Not all Chimps will do it, but chimps can and do, do it. Some Chimps hunt monkeys for food in their territory. It’s royally fucked up, but its a thing they do. And you know how different human DNA is to theirs? About 1%. I personally don’t see anything wrong with saying “An entire species is evil” in any setting other than that being shallow as fuck. I also personally don’t see anything wrong with suggesting that a species has limited empathy because honestly...? Just look at nature and even humans. Fantasy and Scifi often entertain the idea of “What if we are not the only living things smart/naturally equipped enough to build a society?”  But the sad reality is if we weren’t? Most other species wouldn’t act a damn thing like humans, most other species probably wouldn’t give a shit about us, and a large number, even if they can and do act like us in some ways, will not in all ways.  So, to bring this ramble to something resembling a conclusive point: Fantasy/Scifi “Racism” (As in just being prejudiced, although it should just be Xenophobia, IMO) is way more understandable and even more easily believable than the real thing because we stopped talking humans the second we brought in the crazy dudes with octopus heads. Or who are just naturally, by virtue of their species (not “race”) psychic. And even if it was just between groups that didn’t exist, nature proves that it would most definitely happen.  But those are just my thoughts, anybody wanna weigh in? I’m all ears. 

[caffeinated-yearning]

Oh perhaps I got a wee bit carried away. Here’s some follow-up to the one that byte posted a bit ago, following Oliver’s side of things since he’s the Me One. Featuring a little of Byte and a little of the byte-verse Doctor Octavius. Tagging @werewolfpine because it’s a continuation of his fit and features a little of his S/I at the end (and also because I did do a little reformatting since the doc oop)

Word Count: ~2.2 k Warnings: violence, angsty narrative tone, probably difficult to read because it’s very stream of consciousness

- but he swung a metal bar at Byte’s head- “Ollie! Why are you doing this? Please, talk to me!”-

Doc Ock’s tentacles, in constant motion, seemed to slow behind him at this new information. Rippled and writhed with the horror of it. “...Nate?”

Oliver glared at this person that wore the costume of New York’s beloved vigilante; glowered at this person that wore Nathan’s face in the New York night; felt downright malevolent at having guessed this twist a hundred times prior and every time having filed it away as ludicrous because there was simply no way that fate would have woven Oliver into Nathan’s foe. He was furious, because he should have known it even if it had all seemed just a little too poetic for the universe to do. He didn’t want it to be possible, which was exactly why he had discredited each piece of evidence and chosen to believe the thin and frail excuses he’d been handed.

“Listen,” Spider-Byte raised his hands to his chest- pressing them to his heart only leaves an opening, “I can explain. I… I know what you’re thinking.” Writhing, agony-stricken, claws and tentacles that lashed with unspent energy away from him. “Or, I guess I don’t, I never do, but… Just-.”

A hideous rattling crunching ripping and tearing as Doc Ock pulled scaffold apart. Bitter and bitter and bitterer still. “Nathan..?” And how dare the vigilante be wearing the face of his best friend and how dare he tell Oliver that he was in the wrong and how dare he be right when Oliver had always had to be the right one before?!

How the HELL DARE HE?

“wAIT! Just-just listen to me!” And Nathan ran at Doc Ock; if Ock had his glasses still, perhaps he would see the desperation in that so-human face. A metal bar swung at Nathan’s head- get him away, get us away, get me away,- and Nathan caught it and and Nathan has had this sort of strength for who knows how long at this point. “Ollie! Why are you doing this? Please, talk to me!”

Oliver hated that perhaps worst of all; that Nate was Nathan was Spider-Byte, that he wanted to talk, that he called him by that stupid diminutive nick-name that Oliver loved because Ollie was a softer version of himself, a version that he didn’t let himself be, because he’d been taught for so long that softness was weakness. That Oliver was going to be better than most, and so he didn’t have time to be soft. Hated that Nathan had kept being Oliver’s friend despite every effort of Doc Ock to destroy Spider-Byte. He hated every blasted domino in the whole tower of his life that now came crashing down around him, and every little bread-crumb that now made perfect sense.

Oliver swiped at his eyes to clear the salt and water/dropped the metal beam still clasped in Byte’s arms/lashed out to knock Nathan off his feet in the span of three seconds. Turned tail and ran, down the streets, searching for the start of where his internal map made sense and where he could start to make his way back to his dungeon-like domain.

And tomorrow, Byte-who-is-Nathan will still be in class like he has been every other time that someone was causing a problem and the Spider had to step in, and Nathan has known who I am for months, and he still tries to save me.

-

“I think I’ve made a grave mistake.”

Doctor Octavius looked up after a moment’s pause. “Well, do you care to elaborate?”

“I… I think I’ve lost one of my dwindling few friends.”

“Well, that does sound grave.” Uncle Otto pushed his computer aside, turning to his student and nephew with one part easygoing authority figure and two parts sincerity. “From what little I’ve heard from you, you really don’t have many friends to spare, even at the best of times.”

“No.” He grit his teeth, held his breath, pressed his nails into his palms with the faint hope that they might break the skin and let him focus on something else. They didn’t, of course, because he had too strong an instinct against pain. Seconds that always seemed to pass too quickly while he struggled to say anything; “I just found out… That one of the people I considered a friend… Probably hasn’t thought of me as anything more than an enemy.” He shook his head; that wasn’t quite right. Nathan wasn’t… He wasn’t like that. “Or maybe I just… Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I made an enemy of my friend. I really am insufferable.”

“Have you spoken to this friend about this yet?”

“Not… As such.” He tried to forget that Oliver/Doc Ock/both of them/all of him had reacted so violently when the Spider had taken off its mask and revealed that the enemy of Doc Ock was the closest friend of Oliver, that both halves were the same thing, that in a world of horrible coincidences this was the worst of them all.

“Listen,” Nathan raised his hands to his chest, “I can explain. I…I know what you’re thinking. Or, I guess I don’t, I never do, but…Just–”

Tried to forget that he had tried to blot it out that he had tried to get rid of it that he had tried to make it go away.

Shook like a leaf in a tempest against the emotions that he had been crushing away for years and years that burst forth at the memory- but [Oliver/Doc Ock/he/they/all] swung a metal bar at [Spider-Byte/Nathan/his sworn enemy/his closest friend]’s head- “Ollie! Why are you doing this? Please, talk to me!”-

Otto nodded, eyes closed behind his tinted glasses. “Perhaps you ought to start with that, then.” He stopped, then added; “or rather, perhaps you should give it a little more time to settle before you do that. You don’t seem to have recovered altogether from the shock.”

Oliver gave a subtle tilt of his head. A half-nod that was all he could muster with his voice threatening to crack like glass in his throat and his body barely responding to any input from the central processor/brain. His mouth struck against incoherent shapes of half-words and syllables and desperate prayers to gods he did not believe in, and was entirely silent.

“Pull that chair over and set your backpack down. There’s no reason for you to stay standing this whole time. You don’t look like you’re in any state to leave, in any event.” It was only by a very slim recollection of sensibilities that Oliver remembered not to let his backpack fall from his shoulders with a heavy thud that even textbooks would not explain. To take it off, set it down. To turn to the chair and pull it over and set it up right and sit in it and make sure the desk was clear and set his glasses aside and then to set about the difficult task of crying in front of someone that was his superior, according to the law of school, according to the law of familial structure. Ugly, a little voice that sounded like a spider or a seraph whispered in the dark of his murky mind. How ugly it is, to cry. You are… weak and ugly, to cry. And it was, in part, calculated, like all things are- this to make him cry harder so that everything would be done with as soon as possible. It was, in part, that he didn’t have any more control over the voice that seemed to be him and not-him than he had over the actions of the people of New York, who thought that he was purely evil, who thought the world of his friend who he thought the world of and had tried to harm. “Wh-what if my-- s-sins are a-already too-o much to bear-?” he asked, in as low a voice as he could, despite the tears and the snot that were going to demand his jacket be washed tonight to prevent anyone seeing that and extrapolating anything with respect to the possibility of Oliver the iron-hearted having cried. “What if I- a-am conde-emned before I ever s-speak?”

“Then the worst case scenario is that you’ve lost a friend. And think how many more people there are; you’ll find other friends. They won’t be the same, but sometimes it can’t be helped. Sometimes you just have to accept that it’ll hurt for a long time, and that there was nothing you could do to change what already happened.” Otto put a hand on Oliver’s shoulder, despite the flinch that he felt even in the midst of that much of what was certainly a humiliating experience already. “But then, that’s the worst case scenario. The best case; want to guess what that will be?”

“I want to be-e a miserable herm-mit who lives in a grotto and n-ever sees the sun.”

“Then I’ll just tell you, since you’re being a miserable little hermit right now.  The best case scenario is that it was all a misunderstanding-.”

“Due to circumstance-es that I won’t g-o into, that’s not a po-osibility.”

“-Or else it will be worked out, like a couple of adults and friends ought to do. After the dust has settled, and you can talk about it without fits of hysterics.” The weight of Otto’s palm, the heat of it, the fact that Otto didn’t try to move or change the sensation at all, so that Oliver could focus on that, keep his attention on that; pull himself out of the bog by that little lifeline that had been extended. “The best case scenario is that everything goes back to normal, or as close as it can get, and your friendship doesn’t change.”

“You’re going to tell me that the most probable thing is… Something in between.” 

“That your friendship is significantly changed, and that you’ll have to both work on fixing it, or else let it fall apart.”

“Mm.” Oliver rolled his head to one side, his whole face salt-stained and puffy with the awful fact of having cried so much in so short a time. “Are you sure I can’t just change my name and live in a cave?”

“You could, but I’d hate to see my nephew go.” Otto lifted his hand, pulled it back toward himself. “So what did happen between you and Nathan?”

Oliver flinched.

“Really, you two sit side-by-side every day and you expect me to not notice when you choose to sit on the opposite side of the classroom?” Doctor Octavius tsk-ed twice. “You ought to realize that I do have eyes by now, even if I happen to wear these glasses often.”

-

| One text message from Ollie Ollie Oxen Free |

Nathan looked at the phone blankly. A week and a half of this... of avoiding each other in every conceivable way. He had just gotten to his apartment not ten minutes ago. A week and a half of seeing, occasionally, that bubble (Ollie is typing…) and watching it vanish without anything to show for it. A week and a half of Nathan being that bubble (Nathan is typing…) with nothing to show for it, until the time between Oliver’s little attempts at speaking became days apart, and Nathan’s also slowed, and he assumed that was the end of it.

And now there was an entire text message (!) from Oliver.

What the hell did he want?

‘Have you heard of the man who spent his whole life mining through a mountain range to make sure medical care would be accessible for his village? The trip around the mountains to get a doctor from the next town over took too long and as a result his wife died. In his grief, he cut a path through, so that no one else would have to die due to the length of the path that he had had to travel. I can’t remember his name, but I think that was pretty noble of him. How strange it must be, to have death be the motive for such a drastic change in the physical world? He literally moved mountains.’

Nathan read, and re-read, and tried to figure out just what the fuck this was supposed to mean, because he was tired after a long day of classes, and he still had homework, and there was a constant threat that someone, somewhere, would decide that breaking half the city was a fine way to spend a Wednesday afternoon.

But what the fuck was that supposed to mean? Obviously it meant something, because Oliver always hid his stupid feelings under layers of allegory and associative story-telling instead of being open and honest (or perhaps that was him being as open and honest as he knew how, and if that was the case he needed to learn that sometimes saying what you mean is better than metaphors).

‘I hadn’t heard of that.’ Nathan really tried to say something more, but found that no words came. Well. At least this was almost a dialogue.

‘Do you think Doc Ock will show up in the near future? He’s been quiet for a while I think.’

And if Nathan had never heard a warning before he’d still have understood that this was one.

Spider-Byte stepped out of the window, swinging through the city without a clue as to where he had to go, but knowing he had to go somewhere soon.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

To Earn the End of the World

The wind howled through hallways made up entirely of printed paper and cardboard. Damp, the smell of rotten pulp and running ink and mold hung heavy in the air and stung in Kim’s nostrils. Her head stayed on a constant swivel as she progressed with slow, tentative steps.

Every time her combat boots touched the ground, it squelched in a way appropriate to soggy cardboard, having soaked up every tear of joy and disappointment and despair, and torrents of rain.

Old newspapers from throughout the ages plastered these soft walls and floors, sealing the seams with information of all things past and all that could have been. The maze made of rejected paper and cardboard trash wobbled rhythmically. Shuddered.

Something sharp and glass-like crunched under the treads of her boot. She stopped and lifted her foot to see what lay there, and found it to be a broken light bulb. The dim illumination throughout the cardboard maze had no light source, but now it flickered.

Then the light went out.

“Will you even be you when you make it out of here?” asked the Glass King. His voice echoed through these strange corridors. “Will you even make it out of here?”

Kim gave no reply. Instead, she pressed on. By sense of touch, her trembling fingers grazed and skidded along the wet walls. In some places, it felt like touching a sponge. Other times, the tears and rain had not quite drenched the cardboard or newspaper, making the blind sensation on her hand a more abrasive one. She could feel the ink rubbing off, blackening her fingertips.

“Not that I wouldn’t mind if you lost yourself in here like so many others,” sang the Glass King in a strange and unfamiliar melody. “So many lost, never to leave again. But you do remember this is no dream, right?”

Pausing to see if she could fathom where his imperious voice was coming from, she clamped her eyelids shut so hard that it almost became painful. But the cardboard and paper swallowed the echoes quickly and she had focused on it too late before he fell silent again.

She grinded her teeth together before she found the right words and said, “You can’t stop change. Everything—”

He just laughed over it all.

“You’re afraid of it. Everything changes,” she said, trying to outmatch his volume. But the laughter only continued and she added, “That’s all you’re really afraid of, isn’t it?”

The Glass King’s roaring mirth stopped. Clipped.

No human eyes could see her in that darkness yet she smirked, filled with new confidence.

“Guess you’re a wimp after all,” she shouted.

Then her face fell, for it dawned on her that the Glass King and his minions might locate her in this maze by following her voice.

She kept her mouth shut and continued moving, a trembling hand feeling the uneven lengths of the walls. Bumpy, lumpy, damp, wet, dry, flaking, tumorous. Dead and alive at the same time. Inching her way down the pitch-black corridor.

When Kim’s groped thin air where the wall gave way to a soft corner and sharp left turn, she felt her way to the opposite side and found that it also took a sharp right turn. A junction where the path split at least two ways. Realizing this, her heart skipped a beat.

Navigating a maze was bad enough, doing so in complete darkness was daunting, and outrunning a self-proclaimed god and his army of cosmic rejects while doing all that?

She could feel the blood drain from her face. Her palms turned clammy and the cold sweat began to ooze from her pores. She had no sense of how long she had been straying from her goal in this place—minutes, hours, or days. But she had to get out of this maze as quickly as possible.

It had already made her forget small things, like the last thing she ate, the name “Theodore”, and her favorite color. Echoes of thoughts emerged from the walls, threatening to drown her identity in their seductive whispers, clouding the back of her mind. As the House always did to every person who dared visit it.

A sharp sting of pain pulled her back into the present and centered her. She pricked her palm with a safety pin and withdrew it. She sucked on the tiny injury and tasted that iron taste. It, too, helped her loop her mind back onto who she was. On who she wanted to be.

The walls shuddered and rustled. The House judged not. It only tested one’s resolve.

“You never answered my question,” said the Glass King. Much closer now. “You fear the answer, don’t you?”

Brightness permeated the black screen of her eyelids. They fluttered open and she was no longer in the maze of cardboard and newspapers. Instead, the walls were lined with rows upon rows of skulls and bones, like one of those old European ossuaries. A macabre place, but bright with light and strangely comforting. A faint sweet smell hung in the air, like incense. Or rotten fruit.

“I have no fear. All of us who oppose you, we have a sense of self that transcends what anybody can even see on the surface. An inner being—a strong soul—that rejects the yoke that others willingly bend and bow to,” she told the Glass King.

No response. But she instantly regretted that spike of expressing her pride. It may have sent waves through the House, allowing the covetous and vengeful “god” to follow her from one place to the next.

She continued walking, picking up the pace. The soft light came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Not a single lantern, bulb, or torch hung anywhere. Just a sea of bones, covering every surface.

Something rattled. Clicked. Kim froze.

Some things. Grinded and rattled some more. Clacked.

She looked over her shoulder. Thousands of empty sockets stared back at her. All skulls had shifted and they now faced her. Hollow and forgotten, a testament to those who had come to this place and lost their minds along the way. These were no mere skulls. Soulful and envious, they stared, even without the jelly and blood and brains that made up eyeballs that could see.

Just dark, hungry voids. And she felt watched by that emptiness. Kim began to see herself in them and wondered if anybody would be able to tell which one she was if her own skull took its place among these rows.

The sharp sting of pain from the pin’s pointy tip returned because she pricked herself again, though not as deep this time. Nothing changed, but the skulls were only skulls. They shuffled and scratched and whispered but always only behind her back, and never in tongues meant for human ears.

The weight of her duffel bag weighed her down and its presence made itself clearer now. The strap supporting it chafed against her shoulder with every turn and step. She picked up the pace and continued wandering through this maze of skulls with their accusatory empty eyes. Envious that she had yet to fail like they had.

Whenever she let her gaze wander, the skulls that came into sight had shifted to stare at her. When she turned again, knowing what direction to wander in despite this place being another maze, the corridors had gotten tighter. Narrower.

She had to walk so closely by the skulls that she could see the emptiness in their eye sockets up close. There was truly nothing there. She bit her tongue as soon as she caught herself pondering if they were truly manifestations of lost souls, or something else.

Because that’s how they got you. Once you lost your mind in this maze, it absorbed you. Made you part of it.

Ate you up and stored you in the fat of the multiverse’s underbelly while the world you came from thought you went missing and eventually forgot about you.

Stinging pain, once more. That safety pin hurt, but it helped center her. She had taken it for this exact purpose, anointed it in the blood of a dying king so the House could not easily erode it—prepared for the House’s merciless and devouring nature.

“Everything you think and say rings hollow,” said the Glass King. It was Michael’s voice, but something else had latched onto his being. Something warbling or ever so slightly garbled, warping it like a twisted and malevolent machine.

Kim recognized Michael’s voice in there, replete with his charming southern drawl. But whatever had taken him and formed the Glass King was in charge now.

The barely perceptible sound of it—riding on every syllable and hiding behind each word—it was not human. It sounded sharper but like someone lying through their teeth, like a blade wrapped in softest velvet.

“Superficial horseshit,” said the Glass King. His voice echoed through these skull-faced walls. “You are unhappy with the hand life has dealt you, like everybody else. But you rebel against it, delude yourself into thinking that anybody has ever made any meaningful change before you. You just want to feel better about yourself.”

Kim gritted her teeth and wandered like that until her jaw began to hurt from the pressure. She looked back to see if the man in the long black duster had caught up to her, for his voice sounded so much closer. But due to the nature of the House, it was impossible to determine any distances. Here, every distance proved to be relative, and every presence a hostile tendril of supernal forces, slithering out and stumbling the people ensnared in its bowels.

She finally replied, “No. I want to be myself. So does Kevin. And all the others who have fought, bled, gone insane, and died to see what lies hidden in the secret heart of the world. To bring it to the light and reveal it so all may see. That is the only way for us to feel truly better about ourselves.”

Next she looked over her shoulder, the walls had converged, leaving only an opening small enough to reach through but not climb through. The skulls all stared at her, and through that opening, she saw the man in the duster.

The Glass King stared at her through that hole. Shaded spectacles shielded the stalker’s eyes, concealing wherever exactly he looked. The diffuse light refracted in strange ways from the silver rims of those sunglasses. He budged not one bit, did not run like the predator that he was. But she felt her pursuer’s gaze burning a hole right into her soul.

“You are ready to burn down the world for your petty desires?” he asked.

His lips barely moved but his voice boomed and chilled her to the bone. Dust rained from the skulls on the ceiling that stared at them. The House hungered not only for her, it hungered for his soul as well. His souls—whatever Michael had become. The Glass King was not one, but many. And his power, as infinite as it may have seemed in the world she hailed from, was dwarfed by this ravenous place.

She set her jaw and answered, enunciating every syllable with trembling anger, “You are not?”

He rammed a fist into the pocket of his long coat and she turned tail and ran. No time to lose and too afraid to find out what was in there, she fled. Brushing past the skulls on the walls, leaving only enough space for her to sidestep through the narrowest spots, they scraped any exposed skin and the dust burned in those little scratched spots.

Good. She welcomed that pain, like the safety pin’s needle pricks focusing her. She had already rounded several corners, uncaring about where her path led her now.

No more guilt. No more second-guessing.

The next corner she turned, she tripped over a skull jutting out from the wall. Or had it shot out there to trip her? Kim tumbled, and the world spun around her. With growing dread did she realize she had lost the safety pin as she fell and tossed and turned. Like a dreaming person, restless in bed, with reality fading in and out, light and darkness clashing and colliding.

The warm, indeterminable light of the ossuary made way to a dull gray twilight and she slammed against something hard and rocky, bringing her rolling fall to a sudden and painful stop. She welcomed that pain again.

Not only was she battling the Glass King, she was defying the House. But the House’s overwhelming force was so much greater than either of them.

A nexus on the edge of reality. An intersection between worlds.

Greater than all people combined. Greater than anything that fancied itself a god and attempted to rival such power. Greater than the whole of several worlds put together.

As she regained her bearings, she saw she had hit a piece of rubble. Smoldering heat surrounded her, rising from the scorched ruins of a burnt down building. Bright red and yellow embers rose, trailing skywards around plumes of thick smoke. Fog enveloped this place and snow gently drifted everywhere in soft, fuzzy flurries.

The cold wintry air began to bite every patch of exposed skin as soon as she rose to her feet again and patted some of the ashes from her black leather jacket and black jeans. The house’s wood and stone, now charcoal, crunched underneath her boots as she approached the single only doorframe standing on this island, deprived of the walls that once encased it.

Standing out in the middle of this husk like a beacon, left over from the destruction of some lesser home.

With its door intact, jutting out from the remains of this destroyed house, she saw it as her only means of egress from this place. Sometimes, a thought sufficed to transition from one place to another, from one state of being to another. Other times, it took the shape of a tangible portal, like this one.

A lonesome lake’s waves lapped at the shores all around her, and a half-sunken rowboat tied to a dock lazily and rhythmically thumped against the old rotten wood. It made her pause and her sweeping gaze then spotted a small shed, just beyond a garden ravaged by time and an infinite winter’s unforgiving cold.

The shed also featured a door, but her heart began to race as she looked upon it. It was just a simple wooden door, but behind it lurked an overpowering darkness. One she grew to know better with every passing second.

The forlorn door amidst the rubble of the larger house led to some place uncertain. It frightened her, but in the way that unknowing fills people with fear.

And that was better than whatever opened the shed’s door.

The man in the black duster and silvery shades emerged from its darkness, peeling out from the shadows. He rose to full height after climbing out of the shed’s door. Gravel and frost crunched underneath his shoes as he approached, his pace slow but certain.

He grinned, from ear to ear. The wider it grew, the clearer it was: it was no human grin. Michael’s facial muscles and flesh should not have allowed such a grin. No human’s skull had that many teeth. This was the thing inside of him, altering the fabric of his body with every passing second.

No—the thing he had merged with.

A demon, she figured. But there was no way to know for sure unless they deigned to share.

Together, they formed the Glass King.

“Spare me your fucking speeches,” she spat at them. She backed up towards the door leading nowhere while she continued to taunt them, “Just a load of crock, all big talk for someone who pretends to be defending some old crusty world. You’ll only go as far as that same world is willing to serve you. The moment it doesn’t suit you, you’d burn it down in a heartbeat.”

They never stopped grinning at her when the Glass King answered, “I was once where you are now. Full of piss and vinegar, and ready to change. Change everythi—”

“Shut up—”

“So? What changed?” asked the Glass King. “I taste the questions burning on your tongue. I can smell your thoughts. I can feel your uncertainty, tickling the living flames in my veins.”

Without turning, she pawed at where the door’s handle was. Started twisting the knob.

“Nothing. Nothing changed, Kimmy. That’s exactly the thing. You might think of the rebirth of the world as something earth-shattering. Something cataclysmic. But it was subtle. Most people don’t even—”

“Maybe you didn’t change it enough.”

Something clicked, and she shoved the door open by leaning into it, pushing it with all her weight and stumbling blindly through it, falling backwards.

Clicking. Flashes of bright white light that filled her vision with black spots and blinding, dazing stars. Obfuscating the transition from one place to the next. She tripped over something hard, like hitting the curb and staggering onto a paved sidewalk. Buzzing, clicking, more flashing, everywhere. Excited voices.

Haphazardly, she shielded her eyes with a raised hand and glimpsed between her splayed fingers a whole mob of photographers, all clustered around her and beleaguering her like a celebrity surrounded by paparazzi thirsty for the perfect shot.

Kim bit her tongue until she tasted blood again and that helped dispel the presence somewhat, lessening the number of flashes flaring up around her. But the House smelled how close to the brink she had gotten. It refused to ease up. Thus, neither did the crowd give her any quarter.

The footsteps of the Glass King followed her, rapping against the sidewalk. Those sounds thundered, piercing through voices of the crowd, sending streaks of pain that shot through her skull and blotted out coherent thoughts.

“Maybe we changed it too much,” he said.

She pushed her way through this crowd of illusions. Brushing by fabric and flesh that felt all too real. Fingers, not quite grasping, just sliding off of her as she violently shoved past them. Lenses that greedily reflected and captured her image. And the cameras of the mob continued to flash, robbing her of any chance of catching a solid glimpse of her surroundings.

Some dreary city sidewalk. Umbrellas in all sorts of garish colors. Foggy, too, but with the tiny pinpricks of rain hanging in the air and stinging as she stumbled through the crowd. Nothing grounded her anymore and when she thought of the safety pin she had lost—one of the few connections she still had to the world she came from—she thought of something else—

“Doesn’t matter,” said the Glass King, mere steps behind her, muffled by the cacophony around them. For he had to push through the crowd as well. “There’s no going back. Just like there’s no way out for you. Give up and you won’t suffer.”

Her only sliver of hope was that the House hungered as much for the Glass King as it did for her.

And the realization, finally sinking in: the Glass King was desperate. Possibly more so than she was. Desperate to stop her. The certainty in his stride, the cocky tone and the arrogant air all a charade, played out to intimidate her. Used to dub that despair.

“And Kevin?” she breathed.

Kim unzipped the top of her duffel bag and reached into it until her hands found purchase on the smooth cardboard surface of a white box in there.

“Oh, I’ll make him suffer, alright. Make him suffer real good,” the Glass King said.

He chuckled and it grew into laughter until it drowned out the clipped and incomprehensible voices of the House’s crowd of ghosts surrounding and engulfing them.

“So no deal,” Kim said, her confidence growing.

That cardboard box was her nuclear option. The things inside of it thumped against their confinement in anticipation, making its walls bend outwards. Through gritted teeth, now grinning herself—but a grin of hope and madness blending together—she spoke, “Here’s my offer to you, you sack o’ shit. You have this one chance to walk away.”

The laughter died down but the echo lingered and the crowd went silent. The clicking and flashing continued, brighter than before. Kim turned to see the Glass King right behind her. His arm already outstretched, his fingertips just inches away from connecting to her face. She pushed farther away from him and he followed.

“You know I won’t. I can’t,” he said. All the pompous air deflated.

Did he sense what was about to happen? They continued to shove through the crowd, through the ocean of flashing, blinding lights. The crowd did not stop them. It only slowed them.

“Oh, you can quit just fine, but you won’t. Don’t lie. Is it your ego? You feeding on someone? Or is this some sorta favor for someone else? You somebody’s bitch, Michael?”

She didn’t give a damn about his answer and ripped the box out of her bag. It still always appeared and looked like a cute little gift box, like the kind you’d expect to contain a cake or pastries. She squeezed it and felt something mushy inside push back. Then its lid exploded.

A cloud of black fog accompanied that explosion growing and roiling and churning. The Glass King gasped and backed away a step, as did the crowd, muttering their words that sounded like someone speaking in reverse. The dark cloud spread in every direction and looked like oil on water.

It flooded and engulfed everything and everyone in mere instants until Kim only saw darkness, spreading like a flood. The bottomless pit kept releasing the deranged jackals from another world that Kevin had trapped inside of it, pouring out from the tiny white box. She could not see the destruction it wrought. She could only hear the screams of the House’s tulpas everywhere.

Mouths. Eyes. Cackling, gibbering, and gnashing of millions of tiny little teeth. The creatures had found a bountiful feast.

Blood and giblets and tiny bits of bone exploded from the tulpas as the swarm slashed everybody around Kim to ribbons.

The Glass King screamed. An ear-piercing, blood-curdling sound, comprised not only of a human shrieking, but also something gurgling and covered in thorny bristles and shuddering with sinister force, amplified to a volume of a legion of evil incarnate.

She dropped the box and ran, pushing through the horde of humanoid bodies. All of them disintegrating around her, being melted and ripped apart by the living flood. She kept her eyes shut, not only to block out the horrors she might otherwise witness, but to keep all the splattering blood from blinding her.

Only when she bumped into a solid flat surface, all hard and cold, did she stop. The screaming stopped and the world had gone silent. The blood on her hands squeaked as her fingertips trailed down the length of whatever had stopped her escape.

She opened her eyes like a newborn and the blurriness of her vision began to clear. She was no longer on that street amidst a crowd of human-looking ghosts with their soul-draining cameras.

Kim stood in front of a tall mirror, now smeared with blood from where she had bumped into it and touched it. In it, she saw her own reflection, dressed up like Kevin. The musician’s clothing was torn and frayed around the edges. Her entire appearance was bathed in gore, the makeup on her face smeared and her hair a mess.

All around her, leading up to this mirror, was a maze of brick-walled corridors, all overgrown with vines and moss. No roof overhead, just a drizzle raining down from a pitch-black, starless sky. Instead of a cold breeze, the air that blew through here was warm and damp, at odds with the rest of this place’s current guise.

No Glass King, no tulpas, no dark cloud of hungry horrors.

She sensed just how close she had gotten. The Heart of the House thrummed around her.

The walls breathed. As if the House had stopped trying to stop her. As if it grew excited. Eager to see a new world birthed from her defiance.

She left the mirror behind her and discarded the duffel bag. Kim had emptied it and the weight of a doomed world hidden in that small white box had been her last means of survival here.

The open roof tempted her to climb up and look out above the maze, but she felt how close she was and how perilous the sights might be.

She knew the stories from those occultists and alchemists and necromancers who had visited the House and lived to tell of it. She knew better. Many a man had lost his mind by just looking into the wrong place of the House’s bowels.

You can’t taste infinity and walk away with your mind intact.

No, she focused and followed that warmth. The breeze—the breathing of the House. The sounds of footsteps echoing. Her digits tingled like they were falling asleep and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up, but she knew those footsteps were not the Glass King’s. If she hurried, he would not be able to harry her any longer.

She trembled all over when she found a massive oaken door around the next curve of the corridors.

This was it.

Kim approached the door and opened it and stepped into the bright room beyond it.

Here, everything that made sense decided to cease doing so. Her injuries stopped hurting. The door behind her quietly clicked as it closed itself behind her and the breeze ceased, shut out. The thrum of the House turned soft and then vanished. A dead silence filled this place.

There was something oddly familiar about the checkered marble floor but she could not yet place it. Or her mind kept pushing it back into its darkest recesses before she could grasp it.

The eye of the storm.

A man sat on a simple stool at the end of this room. In his sixties, bald, with silver stubble on his face, dressed in jeans and a verdant green sweater. Stoic, unmoving. Staring at Kim from the opposite end of the chamber.

It took her a dozen or a thousand steps to traverse the windowless room, from one door to the next. The man sitting there next to the next door stared at her the whole time, awaiting her arrival with eerie patience.

But that man was no mere man. Like the mob of tulpa cameramen crowding her in the streets without names, this thing was another agent of the House.

The final agent of the House.

Kim had gotten this far, just like Kevin. But unlike him, she knew exactly what awaited her. She had shed every last shackle of confusion and she walked the final steps.

Those dozen steps that it took to cross through this room instead felt like one thousand. The room seemed less like a room, and more like a corridor, stretching infinitely to unsettle any visitors.

Any but her, for this journey had reached its end. And a new one awaited, yearning to begin after that final wrap.

Her footsteps tapped loudly against the marble floor, echoes that pierced an otherwise deafening silence. Each of them a little knife, plunged into the back of her head, piercing and painful and reminding her of every little thing that had tried to stop her on her way here.

Of every sacrifice that she and others had made to get here, to reshape the world. With clarity, she knew the end of the corridor to be the gateway to her ascension. Of how hard Michael and the Glass King and their strange army of braindead zombies had tried to prevent this.

Kim finally arrived by the man on the stool. The mysterious man never budged. Never blinked. Just stared at her approaching him all the while.

“You will need these,” said the man on the stool in a silky and soft voice. Kim had expected something gravelly, or burly. But it was higher and cheerier than anticipated.

The man on the stool did nothing to follow up on that. He just sat there, motionlessly. As if waiting for Kim to act first. She shifted her weight uncomfortably, waiting for the man to do something else. Anything.

“No, I have all I need,” she told the man on the stool.

He held out his hand expectantly, like a bellboy expecting a tip.

“I gave every thing I have left to give and have found what lies at the heart of the unseen world. Now, I only have words for you,” she said.

The old man nodded and straightened his sweater jacket. He licked his lips and pursed them, then leaned forward, awaiting what Kim had to say.

“I spent long enough in the House and now is my time to emerge from its depths, naked and content,” she said, the volume of her voice growing as her confidence swelled with each word. “I hereby leave the House, having found my true self. Who I once was shall be buried in the past, and only those of dark hearts will insist on speaking the name I wish to forget. I am Kim, and when I step through these doors, a new world is born.”

“The world of our dreams,” whispered the old man, nodding again.

“No,” she protested. “The real world, reshaped by our dreams, and I will face its every challenge.”

She stepped towards the set of double doors, stopping again and standing next to the old man.

Kim knew not what to expect once she opened these doors and stepped through. She had rescued Kevin from the House by burying him. She was now thoroughly Kim. Stronger for it. The Glass King was not defeated—never would be entirely—but he could not longer prevent her ascension.

She ripped the doors open and walked into the blinding light beyond it. Warm and inviting. She transitioned from one world to the next.

The world ended. Sheer will gave birth to the next.

A horror to some, but a hard-earned victory to others.

—Submitted by Wratts

[clansayeed]

Bound by Circumstance ― Chapter 18: Let Me Do You This Kindness

PAIRING: Nik Ryder x trans*M!MC (Taylor Hunter) RATING: Mature

⥼ MASTERLIST ⥽

⥼ Bound by Circumstance ⥽

Taylor Hunter (MC) has made it good for himself in New Orleans; turns out moving to a new city fresh out of college to reinvent yourself isn’t as hard as people make it out to be. Things only start to get confusing when he finds himself the target of a malevolent wraith. Good thing someone’s looking out for him though — because without Nighthunter Nik Ryder as his bodyguard he definitely won’t survive long in the twisting darkness of the supernatural underworld he’s tripped into.

Bound by Circumstance and the rest of the Oblivion Bound series is an ongoing dramatic retelling project of the book Nightbound and the rest of the Bloodbound series. Find out more [HERE].

Note: Circumstance only loosely follows the events and plotline of Nightbound, and features a separate antagonist, different character motivations, and further worldbuilding.

*Let me know if you would like to be added to the Circumstance/series tag list!

⥼ Chapter Summary ⥽

The Fate intervenes.

[READ IT ON AO3]

“You were there — you were watching us at Prytania Street.”

“In a way, yes and no.”

“It can’t be both. I saw you there.”

“Yes, I was witness to the events of which you speak. But no, I was not there as you were there; on the physical plane. I bear witness to all things. That is my purpose and my burden.”

“You could have done something.”

“You are mistaken, halfling child.”

“Bullshit. That’s—That’s bullshit. Its an excuse to justify doing nothing!”

“If that is what you choose to believe I cannot stop you, only try to sway your mind.”

“Well you won’t.”

“The world’s belief that I am capable of more than giving testimony is a false one. I cannot change the course of what is to be, no more than you can. I see every outcome, every possibility — every path from the moment it is built reaching out into oblivion.

“Who walks those paths — who has the ability to forge them new or break the chain — that is up to the individual. Certain roads will always be taken, yes. But the forces making those decisions were here long before me and will exist long after I am gone.”

He’s angry. And because he’s angry he’s indignant — he doesn’t want to believe them. Not when they speak in the voice of a forgotten child or a lost lover or someone whose time has come yet they find themselves filled with only bitter regret.

Always with the same golden eyes.

The weight of his breath sends Taylor’s body into tremors of emotion. Things he knows all too well — despair, guilt, self-blame — and things he has no name for; might never have a name for in any human language.

They overwhelm him until they don’t. Until he can look at each and every face of The Fate and speak.

“I don’t remember. Why don’t I remember?”

It’s his voice, his tongue curling around the words formed on his lips. But they aren’t his. They’re just sort of pulled out of him like they were trapped deep in his belly on a string.

Words that come not from the mind but from some place deeper. Those dying embers he thinks may have once been called his soul.

The Fate turns their wrinkled face away.

He knows this emotion. Shame.

“Why don’t I remember?” he asks again.

Doesn’t know where he is, or how he got here, or what it all means. But like hell he’s going to move or be moved without an answer.

“I thought it would be kinder.”

Their new voice wavers. A new face looks back at Taylor — creases in a frown that will settle into lines of age eventually, but not quite yet; thinner lips, yet hands still youthful. They look so much like his mother it hurts.

Thought what would be kinder? What happened? Where is everyone? Where is Nik?

All very important questions. All answers he first wants, then craves, then needs in order to remember how to breathe.

Instead he just whispers a weary “please,” because they both know what it is he’s pleading for.

But The Fate is reluctant — that much is obvious. “I would rather you understand before I did.”

“Understand…?”

“That I am merely the storyteller. Not the book, not the author, just a voice reading from the pages.”

This again. Can they blame him for being skeptical? For thinking someone with a name like The Fate might have a say in the order of the universe, in who lives and who dies?

“If I tell you I believe you, will you give me back my memories?” Will you explain? Will it all make sense?

“Would you be lying to me, Taylor Hunter?”

“You’re The Fate — wouldn’t you know?” Then, met with only silence, he does the only thing that feels right. He just shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t — I don’t, okay? I’ve been asked to believe in a lot of impossible things lately, but this… this is more than that, and that makes it harder.”

Because if The Fate really has no say in the way things have been then that means they have no say in the way things end.

The Coven Elders do.

His friends do.

He does.

But not someone who could make it all better.

And that’s terrifying.

“So I don’t know,” he repeats, “and that’s my final answer.” Not the right or wrong answer, but the final one.

He’s met with a chilling reality when The Fate reaches out their hand and he takes it and feels home. The Fate doesn’t just look like his mother; they are wearing her face.

It’s a useless epiphany though.

Because he remembers.

What’s an extra hour or two?

The difference between life and death.

By the time he notices the familiar figure of The Fate standing just off stage left it’s too late.

The screams, the crackle and POP of a spotlight sending sparks showering down onto the stage, the heat and flames and smoke choking the breath out of him — those all came later.

First came the explosive bang of double doors opening at the back of the theatre. If there was ever an apt time for an actor to fumble their lines it was then.

He still hated Antoni, the prick, but gave credit where credit was due — a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it beat in between stanzas and Oberon was right back in the depths of his monologue.

Second was the gust of wind that turned heads — Taylor’s included — to the draft coming through the gaping doorway. It reeked of revelry and jaegerbombs with just a hint of despair.

Taylor was convinced that last bit was his imagination having a last-ditch effort to try and ruin his happiness. Stupid, stupid boy he was; turning back to the stage like that.

Third came thunk. thunk. thunk.

He could recall, if only vaguely, the rehearsal where Daphne suggested imitating the Globe Theatre in London. She wanted to engage with the audience as Puck and the director loved it.

Her last big entrance was from the back of the theatre, right — he’d forgotten.

Thunk. thunk. thunk.

Daphne came barreling down the sloping path — collided with the stage with wet noise.

Or… her head did.

And it rolled in classic horror-movie gothic to stare lifelessly at the audience. Eyes milky white, veins blackened and bulging under tissue paper skin.

What came next doesn’t matter. If the curtain caught fire before or after Theseus fainted from terror didn’t matter.

The only thing that mattered was the wretchedly familiar grotesque hovering in the entryway — the shadow it cast stretching long, mangled limbs out towards them.

The bloodwraith let out a screeching howl that shattered glass, incited fire, sent the entire space into a pitch darkness only to glow and flicker with hungry flames.

I’m sorry. His first and only thought.

Nothing else The Fate gave back to him mattered.

“Holy shit — am I dead?!”

Taylor uses the thought to grapple back onto the present and pull himself together. Doesn’t even think about whether or not he should be using that kind of language in front of a very very old supernatural being but okay maybe he’d been a little premature in the ‘nothing else’ department.

If he was dead that definitely mattered. Because if he was dead Nik was going to kill him.

When The Fate readjusts themselves — a refined and more calm way of saying ‘recovers from whiplash’ — they reassure him with a small shake of the head, silvery wisps on a balding head shaking out to perfect and natural curls. “No, you are not dead.”

“Oh thank god,” he whistles low, but its the relief that catches him by surprise. And not just because he doesn’t have to worry about being chewed out by a surly Nighthunter.

He’s actually relieved to be alive. Or at least not dead. One of those things he wouldn’t normally perturb the semantics over but given everything that’s happened it only seems right.

“Am I alive?”

“In a way.”

“That’s a yes or no question. Please let that be a yes or no question.”

It takes Taylor a moment (his brain is catching up as quick as it can, yeesh) but when it becomes clear The Fate, powerful ethereal being witness to everything until the end of time, is amusing themselves with his reactions he tries his best not to give any.

He fails, of course, but he tried his best.

“Yes, halfling child, you are alive.”

“And —” Nik? Elric? Vera? Cal-Kathy-Cadence? Garrus-Krom-Ivy? “— everyone else?”

“Is there one for whom your concern is greatest?” It sounds almost clinical; doesn’t help that they now sound eerily similar to his hormone therapy physician.

Maybe they hoped Taylor would have to think about it. Maybe they wanted to see what makes him tick.

Too bad. “I’m not picking which of my friends I care about the most, if that’s what weird all-knowing trope you’re going for.”

“Not even your father is placed above them?”

“I barely know the guy. That answer it for you?”

The Fate gives a “hmm” and a nod. “Forgive me, I have never had such luxuries.”

“Family, friends?”

“Those as well. I see the bonds of the material made; thousands, millions in the spaces between heartbeats. But I do not feel them. I wish that I could.”

It rings wrong in his bones. Makes his blood curdle in his veins. “If you’re trying to justify preying on my fears to learn emotions, I’d say stop.”

“Is there a threat to be made?”

“No.” He’s not stupid — but he’s not just going to stand there and take it, either. “You didn’t answer my question. Are my friends — all of them — alive too?”

He can tell The Fate hesitates as one last test of wills. Still it doesn’t stop him from clapping a hand over his mouth when they finally nod.

“Thank god…”

They’d thought it would be safe. That they had time—however brief—to try and make the most of things; time together, the city in all her glory.

Taylor doesn’t realize they’ve been walking together, a simple man and Fate, until he stops and looks out of one of the large windows lining the hallway.

Outside is beautiful. It’s a lacking word but the only one that comes to mind. It’s the kind of sunset that people write entire poems and songs about because they can’t think of a simple one-word description either. So it’ll do.

He drinks it in — the vibrant sunset that reaches long tendril fingers of pinks and oranges across the sky and continues on and on and on into an endless horizon. Bright enough to illuminate dust motes hovering practically immobile in the still air around him. Even his heavy and awestruck breathing doesn’t disturb them.

Like he isn’t even there.

And it occurs to him like an afterthought that if he left this place to commune with that sherbet sky he’d never find the end. There’s a peace in that.

He could ask the obvious; where are we, how did we get here, what does it all mean, but instead he focuses on the things he does know rather than what he doesn’t. “You brought us here.”

“Yes.”

And he hadn’t planned it at all; the trap The Fate has so willingly fallen into. But there it is.

“That means you intervened.” He turns away from the world beyond only because he has to. Catches their ever-changing face in the sunset’s light. “I thought you couldn’t intervene.”

When they finally answer the words are chosen with care; careful not to reveal too much, careful not to make promises unable to be kept. “I did not change the course of what is to come; that is beyond me. But it is not beyond you, and so the lines blur. If you could be guided, or given more time, or protected from a death thought previously inevitable, then perhaps you could enact that change with your newfound advantages.”

His mouth twists ruefully. “You’re telling me you found a loophole in destiny?”

“Of a sort.”

“And you choose now to do it? That’s…” For once in his life Taylor thinks before he speaks; to his benefit. “Unless this isn’t the first time you’ve done it.”

The Fate looks at him with the eyes of a child again; a disturbingly profound wisdom looking him over as if in a new light. “There are very few places in the puzzle of time where I may fit.”

“So all that stuff you said about being an observer — what you’re saying is that’s a load of crap.”

“Would I have told you then what little I could do, would you have believed my interference so small?”

They’ve got a point. “No.”

“Then you see why these revelations take time.”

Maybe he does. That doesn’t change the truth, though. Doesn’t change the thoughts racing through his mind; thoughts of the dozens, hundreds of things that have happened that could have been changed in some little way. Changed had they had more time, or if they’d known more.

Or if he hadn’t been protected.

If Nik hadn’t been in the graveyard, Taylor would be dead. He was there, and at the bar, because…

“You hired Nik to protect me. You were the one on the other end of the phone line.”

“Yes.”

“Did it make a difference? No—No it couldn’t have. You said you couldn’t change it. You —”

“All that is meant to unfold still will. If not as swiftly as the witches had hoped.”

“So all you did was prolong the inevitable.”

“All I did?” his question played back to him in a voice rusted with time, incredulity on The Fate’s new leathery features, “You think so narrowly. What have you changed, what have you incited?”

“The Elders are still —”

“What. have. you. done.”

“I —” Is it any wonder he falters under the intensity of that stare; the weight of their words bearing down on him heavier than anything he’s tried to carry before?

Fine. What has he done?

He’s hurt Garrus by bringing Elric to the show. 

He’s brought Garrus and Krom closer.

He’s put Vera in danger. 

But given her a chance to reconcile with her mother.

He’s the reason Cal was cast out from his pack. 

And the reason Donny is still alive.

Stop it, Taylor wants to say, because there’s no way that annoying voice in his head contradicting everything he’s thinking is him. It’s them — they’re in his mind.

But he’s heard dozens of voices from dozens of their lips; none of them have sounded like him.

And only his voice is ringing between his ears.

“If I’d died in the cemetery that night — would any of those things have happened? Be honest.”

“I see all outcomes; the realms in which they did happen and those where they did not.”

“Okay, so —”

“But because of you, Taylor Hunter, they did. And that cannot be undone.”

Taylor reels at the very thought of it. Talk about daring to disturb the universe. But all those things — they’re speaking of the past, of the present.

What about the future?

“Was it enough, though?” Was it enough to make a difference? Enough to save them? Enough to win?

Instead of answering with words The Fate reaches up, out. Doesn’t let up even though Taylor recoils (for good reason) at the weight of permanence that hangs around them in an unseen aura. According to The Fate themselves there are versions of this story where he dies; is already dead.

And knowing that doesn’t scare him nearly as much as being touched by someone who has seen it happen.

“Those who seek to change destiny always fail,” — something so morbid and hopeless shouldn’t sound so reassuring — “because it will always lie out of their reach. They never understand how to bring it closer. Now you do.”

The warmth of the sunset beyond prickles the back of Taylor’s neck. But even basking in the glow as they have been The Fate’s fingers are cold as ice.

Cold with the weight of the sorrows they’ve seen.

Wherever they are stretches out infinitely on either side of them. He hasn’t seen another soul this entire time. Knows somewhere deep inside himself that no matter how many halls he sees, no matter how many doors he opens, they reside here together. Alone.

So why then does he whisper? Who the hell knows.

“If you’ve seen all the terrible ways this could end… why do it? Why try?”

“Because,” they smile and suddenly Taylor sees why every other part of them is cold; to compensate, “I have hope.”

How, how can they have hope when they know what’s coming? “Hope for what?”

“Hope that you will prove me wrong.” You can change what is to come.

“Talk about your unrealistic expectations.” How?

“It has been done before — however rare.” You already know how.

But he doesn’t.

He doesn’t.

He —

He watches Cal with his arm over Vera’s shoulder — holding her close, pressing his mouth into her hair more a gesture of comfort than a kiss. To remind her the warmth of another body is close. That she isn’t alone.

A bright light flashes in front of his eyes, blinds him. Taylor tries to pull back but the EMT squeezes his shoulder and keeps him in place. “Not yet, bud, just try and follow the light okay?”

It doesn’t really make sense to keep staring at the thing that makes it harder to see but he does what he’s told. Follows the pen light left to right and up to down because that’s what they need of him right now.

“Your friends said you took a pretty hard hit.” He can feel the gloved hand on the back of his head feeling around for a lump, a cut, blood — anything.

Definitely more than the nothing he gets that’s for sure.

“Do you remember anything like that?”

No, he doesn’t. He only remembers silvery curls and an insistent understanding that he’s capable of more than he thinks. But those thoughts aren’t his.

It’s with reluctance that the EMT lets him jump from the back of the ambulance with the closest thing to a clear bill of health.

“Rook!”

Thank god he hears Nik only when there isn’t a stethoscope on his chest because surely his heart stops beating.

Taylor turns, doesn’t have the time to brace himself before he’s inhaling leather. Isn’t smothered by it at all — in fact it helps calm him more than expected.

Then Nik’s looking him over — touching the back of his head and holding up his arms; looking for cuts and bruises and any sign that he’s less than one hundred-percent okay. “Did you get checked out? Why the hell would they let you go? If they’d seen the way your head bounced off that concrete wall they’d be thinkin’ differently. Fuckin’ hell, they…” Just like the EMT he feels nothing, though. But this time Taylor isn’t let off the hook so easily.

“What the hell? There ain’t even a bump.”

“I hit my head?” he asks; realizes it’s the wrong thing to say when Nik’s eyes widen.

“You don’t remember? Shit — we’re gettin’ you to the hospital.”

“I don’t need a hospital.”

“I beg to differ!”

“If you’d —” Taylor actually has to smack the flurry of Nik’s concerned hands away, “— just stop for a sec’? Please!”

Even in the chaos of grief and seemingly fruitless attempts to restore order Taylor is loud. Manages to get more than a few heads turned his way — some that look between him and Nik in rising suspicion. He takes the man’s hand and pulls him off to the side before any of it becomes a thing.

They find the one police car without the overhead lights flashing. Away from the crowd swarming, from people who secretly wished they could be paid to learn what happened and grieve for it. Despite being entirely removed from the situation they are moths; the cruisers that bathe them in reds and blues are their flame.

Nik wastes no time. “You’re starting to scare me Taylor,” and he believes it with or without Nik using his name, “if somethin’ happened to you, somethin’ medical, we gotta —”

“Nik,” he insists again, “stop talking.” Cups his hands along a chiseled jaw and brings the man down to kiss him like that’ll explain everything. In a perfect world, maybe.

But even annoying as he’s being right now Taylor can’t hold it against him. He cares — in his own weird way sure — but he does.

They part for air but he allows strong hands to keep him close.

“I only just got back,” he mumbles almost breathlessly, “I don’t need you jumping down my throat.”

“Wait—what?”

“I —”

There’s a tickle on his forehead as Nik’s brow furrows. “No I heard ya. But you didn’ — we were here the whole —” Lucky for them both when, somewhere in the middle of those half-formed explanations and racing thoughts, he remembers that he’s Nik Ryder; Nighthunter.

“Got back from where?”

“Not here.”

“Yes, here.”

“Nik.”

Taylor would like to believe he relents because of trust, but knows the far more likely explanation is exhaustion. But he does and that’s what matters. “Okay Rook, okay. Your turn to call the shots.”

“First we need to get everyone together. I saw Vera and Cal, but…”

“Kathy an’ Cade were still givin’ statements last I checked. Iv’, Krom, and Garrus hightailed it before the cops showed up. Wait—you’re really sayin’ you don’t remember any of this?”

“Stay focused. Where’s Elric?”

“With them. He was out cold, hurt bad from the looks of it.”

Taylor’s heart straight-up stops beating. “Did the wraith —?”

“No Rook, no he, uh, he took a fallin’ rigging for you. Pushed you right outta the way and that’s how you hit your head. I really don’t like —”

“Later. We can’t go back to the Shift.”

“Well there we agree.”

“There’s my place, but —”

“No, nowhere connected to any of us. The Elders could’a hexed the place.”

“Suggestions, maybe?”

“Well damn Rook — not like I’ve got a map of secret warded places I can just pull outta my ass—actually…” Nik changes his tune so fast Taylor gets whiplash. But he knows the thoughtful look in those dark eyes well enough by now that he dares to have just a little bit of hope.

Why try?

Because I have hope.

By the time he’s pulled out of his brief recollection of The Fate, Nik is pulling him by the hand back into the crowd. They spot the beacon of Cadence’s towering head over everyone else and find the others still recuperating on the curb where he stands guard.

Cal spots Taylor and immediately tries to stand — but he’s leaning far too much to the right to be moving so fast. Katherine catches him, eases him back down with admonishing words.

“What did the EMT just say?”

“Yeah yeah, I ain’t a cub Kathy.”

“Then pay attention next time — to what they’re saying, not to their asses.”

Vera reaches for Taylor like a source of comfort. He takes her hand and squeezes; feels the warmth of her through blue medical latex in a way her usual silk doesn’t allow. Wordlessly she holds up a long scrap of familiar fabric as explanation.

Whatever Cadence had planned on saying, it catches on his tongue to be swallowed back down. Something makes his face turn away with a crinkle in his nose.

“No offense Taylor, but you smell like mold on vellum.”

“Huh?” Cal sniffs the air and comes to a similar conclusion. “Reminds me of the shed Kristof keeps his pelts in — like… dust and mothballs.”

“Uh…” what the hell does somebody say to that, “I’m sorry?”

“Just thought you ought to know.”

“Actually — speakin’ of all that research you do, Smith,” everyone looks at Nik like he’s grown a second head, but no one can match Cadence’s bewilderment; since that has less than nothing to do with the attack that’s left them reeling.

“What about it?”

“Any chance you know if the Saint Louis has still got that, uh, preservation sigil still in the stones?”

“Sure. That whole block of Chartres does.”

Katherine’s eyes narrow suspiciously. “Ryder, what are you thinking?” But he ignores her carelessly.

“Includin’ your office?”

“Yes but — Oh.” Epiphany crosses his face and makes his glasses slide down to the tip of his nose.

And though it may be just as annoying to be on the outs of something Nik, Cadence, and even Katherine with her slow nod of understanding seem to know that the rest don’t — there’s a comfort to it. Like they’re all back in the Shift shotgunning ideas on a chalkboard and not scrambling for a place to hide.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” the way Katherine says it though — it’s like a self-directed insult, “why didn’t I think of that?”

“Think we’ll all fit?” asks Nik.

Cadence gives everyone a calculating look, seemingly taking measurements. “I don’t see why not, so long as you don’t mind a bit of clutter.”

Kathy doesn’t even bother covering her snort, the derisive “Ha!” that earns her something like the vampire version of a pout. She remains unfazed. “That’s putting it a little more than lightly…”

“It’s not that bad. You’re making me out to be a hoarder.”

“Let’s just hope no one’s claustrophobic.”

“Kathy!”

Admittedly Taylor doesn’t know a lot about vampires besides the basics; immortal, super fast, super strong, blood-is-life. But there’s more, isn’t there? There has to be.

For example — werewolves are pack animals. He can guess that vampires are less so. So what fills the void?

Because from what he’s seeing before him… they’re nesting creatures.

This is a nest, right? Please someone say this is a nest, that this is normal behavior. That somewhere else in the city Isadora de la Rosa is just chilling in a giant pile of stuff like some sultry dragoness and Cadence is just following some sort of undead instinct.

Otherwise this guy needs help. Like — Hoarders-level help.

Ryder’s reaction does nothing to ease his discomfort; giving an impressed nod as his eyes sweep the room; the piles… and piles… and piles…

“You’ve cleaned up,” he moves an old filing box with little ceremony to rustle himself up a place to sit; apparently its every butt for itself here, “and is that two walls I can see?”

There are two seats not actively serving as storage and Katherine beelines for it. Cal gets there first with some semblance of victory — though it’s short-lived.

“You’re in my spot.”

“Grow up. First come first serve.”

She repeats herself in an actual growl. “You’re in my spot, Lowell.”

Arms crossed over his chest, he snorts a derisive “I don’t see your name on it,” only to fumble for purchase when she grabs the chair-back with both hands and spins it around.

Her name actually is written on the back. And in very large, blocky permanent marker.

She doesn’t need to tell him a third time. Settles in like it didn’t even happen. Out of everyone gathered, Cadence included, she’s the only one who looks like she really belongs.

“Three guesses why that is.” She says to Nik. It doesn’t take the man long to connect the dots.

“I’d’ve given some money to catch a glimpse of spit-shined Raines in this disaster.”

“Enough!” The vampire groans; finishes clearing up the last of what appears to be an outdoor patio table for the rest of them to prop against. “Unless by some miracle my—admittedly disorganized—attempt at scouring centuries’ worth of documentation in my so-far fruitless pursuit of an identity is the key to vanquishing the threat at hand.

“If so then by all means, continue on!”

It doesn’t help that the awkward silence is broken only when a towering stack of loose papers slides passed the tipping point and collapses somewhere unseen.

“Fuck.”

He accepts his defeat and takes up the chair beside Kathy with a surprising amount of dignity.

But his tirade served more than just a single purpose. It reminds Taylor of why they had to find somewhere to regroup, why it had been necessary in the first place.

You already know how, The Fate had said. And with a surety that had blurred the boundaries of whatever reality they had been in while talking outside of time and space.

Cadence’s mess isn’t the answer.

But someone not-Taylor in the room just might be.

“Vera…”

You already know. And the first thing he sees when he comes back to himself is Vera crying on the curb. That’s not a coincidence. In fact he feels a sharp, almost icy clarity when his train of thought switches tracks.

When he remembers the last time she cried and knows — just knows — that everything going forward isn’t random chance. It’s all meant to be.

Wordlessly they clasp hands. If before they were only doing this together and for Kristin, the same can’t be said now.

Taylor begins with a soft “I’m sorry,” because what he’s going to ask her is hard but there’s no way around it; he tries to be kind because she deserves that much at the very least, “but I’m gonna need you to tell me… tell us, I guess… what exactly you meant when you said you, uh, recognized the bloodwraith.”

Where’s a falling stack of papers when you need one?

Directly following another attack isn’t the best time to ask something that heavy. Everyone’s thinking it, but either lacks the guts or has enough brains not to speak it aloud.

The longer they wait the less time they have. If their minutes in the hourglass aren’t borrowed already.

Taylor can’t imagine the amount of courage it takes for her to share. She’d already been one sneeze away from “no no never mind, I don’t wanna bother you with it, let it go please; for me” back in the apartment. He recalls a brief flash of relief when they were interrupted. Though that didn’t last long given the news.

He’s there, you know, if she wants a hand to hold. Hesitates that hand over her shoulder as he watches the woman close in on herself… and lets it fall.

By the time she’s ready Cadence has ducked out and returns with a tray of water glasses and steaming mugs of fragrant teas. Three sleeves of soda crackers once abandoned are now their equivalent of a replenishing snack after a long journey.

All of it a little too mundane for the conversation at hand.

Vera gives herself a few shaky breaths — and begins.

“You ever been to one’a those big family reunions; the kind where you don’t know more than half’a the people showin’ up but it’s a birthday or a funeral or the like and you don’t really have a say in the matter?”

Literal crickets.

Even when she looks at Cal for backup he shakes his head and offers a shrug as an apology. “The Pack may be big but we’re tight. It’s impossible not to know someone, even if it ain’t a face but a scent.”

“But we can imagine.” Katherine makes a ‘continue’ gesture without bothering to mask the haste. “Keep going.”

Vera does.

“You’re wrong there, Kathy. No’ne who ain’t born a Reimonenq can really get what happens when you get more than a dozen’a us in the same room. All with the same blood in our veins but any opportunity to marry out the family, to change the name with somethin’ more bindin’ than just a court order — they take it.

“Last one I went to was ma Mémé’s funeral. Nawlins funerals, you know how they are —” only this time Taylor’s the sole sore thumb but no one stops to explain, “— and since she ran the Reimonenq Clan everyone who once carried the name or could have done was bound by duty to attend.”

Wistful memory clouds her eyes for a long moment. Whatever memory it is can’t be a happy one, not by the tick in her brow. “Met my uncle for the first time there. I didn’ even know Momma had any siblings — and here come up walkin’ two. They could’a been any random strangers on the street but they were huggin’ me and tellin’ me about seein’ me as a baby and…”

Katherine makes a not-so-subtle noise and shifts in her chair until it squeaks loud enough for Cal to flinch. It’s her chair, bears her name. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

Before she can say anything Cadence tactfully intervenes.

“So sorry about that; the chair drowned Kathy out. I could be wrong — but I think she was about to ask the relevance of this story and the wraith.”

Vera nods with a startling lack of apology. “If I could skirt around it I would. But every way I’ve thought about… about how I felt when I looked it in the eyes? This is the only way I can make it make sense.”

“It’s okay Vee,” says Taylor, “say what you have to.” And if he doesn’t mind her taking her time because it gets him a better chance of reading her inside, of understanding not just the words on her lips but the ones on her soul, he definitely isn’t going to mention it.

“I could see that they were my blood. Hell they were the spittin’ image of Ton—of Momma before she took over ma Mémé’s operations. The shady… smoky kind. But I didn’t know ‘em. I was five weeks away from my move to New York—I didn’t want to know ‘em.”

“Did they have the…?” She looks at Ryder sharply, watches him mime his hands without rhyme or reason. Her nostrils flare in anger.

“No. Turns out the Reimonenq Curse is a picky lit’le thing; picks the first born — or the only born, in my case. I got why she didn’t keep in contact when I found that out.

“I didn’ know why it bugged me s’a much until later. ‘Cause I just couldn’t give rhyme or reason to how I could see so much’a myself in stranger’s eyes.”

A hush falls over the group. Within it — an understanding. No longer with the need to ask Vera to tie her story together because she’s actually a lot more intuitive than even Taylor previously gave her credit for.

And now those tears of hers — always justified, always — they’re more than that. They’re understood.

Vera had looked into the eyes of the bloodwraith. What she had seen was far worse than simple familiarity.

She’d seen a part of herself in the rotting void of its skull. Recognized something hereditary in scraps of rotting flesh stuck in the gaps between its mouthful of fanged teeth.

And she’s still fucking standing, she’s still sane?

Not that there was any competition but Vera Reimonenq was definitely just crowned the strongest of them all in a landslide victory.

She gives them each individual looks. As if daring any of them to try and play Devil’s advocate. But why would they? You don’t fake something that soul-crushingly awful.

“There’s more.”

Cal kicks back on the floor with a groan. “Any chance there isn’t?” He’s the only one who could get away with it though.

“I wish that were the case. I’d been tryin’ to find the right time to bring it up — turns out it just needed to be brought up for me.”

I’m sorry, says way Taylor pulls her in for a one-armed hug.

It ain’t your fault, replies the last weary quirk of her lips.

“I ain’t the only one.”

“Tonya,” supplies Cadence, and Vera’s wobbling bottom lip breaks all their hearts in unison.

“Yeah—Yeah Momma she… she felt it too. I could see it in her eyes. She won’t spare it a thought but I don’ believe in coincidences anymore. She an’ I both feelin’ the way we did, then that thing’s touch takin’ away her Curse —”

“Mary Mother of Christ!”

The vampire stands so fast his chair goes flying into a stack of boxes — lucky for them all whatever contents are heavy enough to stay standing.

At first Katherine looks worried beside him, though it dulls quickly into exasperation. “Folks and faes I give you the Drama King…”

“Not the bloody time.” The look in those ruby eyes is almost manic — just like they had been when Cade had tried infodumping on them at the Shift. Only this might be slightly more relevant — hopefully.

“Care to share?” Cal drawls.

Cadence pays him no mind; focuses only on Vera and gets her attention in turn. There’s almost anticipation in the way he whispers, “You figured it out, didn’t you?”

“Well I wasn’t sure — not until now. You knew him?”

“I had the misfortune.”

“And you were… around when the Coven retaliated.”

“Like I said,” he wipes the lenses of his glasses with such convenient timing he could only be avoiding meeting her eyes, “I had the misfortune.”

It isn’t long after that they realize no one else is even close to catching up to them. A silent back and forth emerges Cadence as the lucky soul burdened with explanation.

“We’ve been so focused on the what of the bloodwraith,” there’s no possible way he knows what stack to dig through, it has to be a diversion to remove himself from the heart of the matter; doesn’t stop him from nudging Nik aside and rifling through an open filing cabinet, “what it is, what it seeks, what it can do.”

Nik grumbles at Taylor’s side. “And that ain’t important?”

“No no — it is. But it… it gave us tunnel vision. Made us docile; we stopped asking questions. Aha —”

Cadence pries free a packet; the contents of which Taylor can’t see even if he squints.

But the text must not matter because he focuses instead on a carefully cut newspaper article attached to the front. The same old paper as his news spread on the war — ink the same faded black.

He can barely look at it, though. Offers it to Kathy’s awaiting hand. “The fire was too great not to make the paper. Carlo personally ensured the cause of the blaze was covered up but no one could keep the deaths quiet. The city only knew three young women perished — not that they were the Garden Coven’s newest blooded witches. And because that fact needed to be concealed at all costs… there were no consequences for him to face.”

“For who to face?” Taylor’s afraid to ask but someone’s gotta do it.

Vera’s voice cracks when she answers.

“My ancestor — Derek Reimonenq. The Bloody Hand.”

“And the tortured soul the Coven used to bind the bloodwraith to this world.”

[vyladromeave]

Mr. Zvahl has updated!

Chapter 6: Forage and Found

(Read the full thing on AO3!)

(A/N: nbvGJDFSFSD THIS IS SO LATE IM SORRY. It was TECHNICALLY done like a week or so ago but it was under 1k words and i just couldnt Post It mnbdsfghfsd. ANYWAYS now its nearly 2k so hopefully thatll make up for the wait nfdsbghdjsf. i have been Neglecting Zoey so now you have to read So Much about my beautiful elf wife mndsfbhjsfdk. not much else to say, ill edit this if i can think of anything important. Also Once Again gentle reminder tht i would seriously reccomend reading this on ao3 instead because tumblr formatting makes the spacing Whack but whatever man u do u,,,, you do u,,,,,, dshjgsfd ANYWAYS Hope u enjoy!!)

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They had been walking for some time now. She had explained on the way out there that the path used to be much clearer, but too much overgrowth in the area had made reaching difficult. It was still possible, it just took extra time. In their case, it had taken a good half-hour at least. (It could have taken longer, but he wasn’t too good at keeping track of the time these days.)

As they approached he wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but now that they were there, he realized it wasn’t actually that different from what he’d imagined. His only experience in portals were the ones that lead to the nether- it somewhat shocked him to see that this portal wasn’t much different. It was about the same size and shape, though the material was different and it gave off an energy that was much less malevolent. Even then, its aura made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, and it wasn’t even activated.

“The portal leads to the Irene Dimension. That’s where we believe Aphmau, and all those that went with her, are trapped.” she continued.

He looked to her, silently asking permission if he could get a closer look, although she didn’t seem to notice. He took it as a yes. He approached the portal to get a closer look while she talked.

“I’ve been working for nearly a decade to find a way to open it again. Nothing has worked so far, but I’m getting close. I can feel it.”

“How so?”

She was somewhat thrown off by how direct his question is. “I- well- when I first started working on this… I didn’t really know what I was doing? I was just throwing things together, I didn’t understand any of it. And now… well, there’s a lot I still don’t understand, I won’t lie about that. Emmalyn was our resident Irene expert, but we lost her to the portal too. But I’ve also learned- I know what I’m doing now, I know the end goal. I just need to figure out how to get there.”

He nods, though his focus is still mostly devoted to the portal. He understands what she means now when she said there was a lot she didn’t understand- if he was in Zoey’s place he wouldn’t even know where to start. It takes him a solid minute to recognize that no, those “scratches” he spotted on the portal are words, and in some language he has no clue of recognizing. He shakes his head. He would love to help out, of course he would, but he isn’t cut out for this.

“Well, you’re the barrier magicks user. If anyone could do it, it’s you.”

She sighs and nods. “I suppose so. I’m not sure if it’s a good thing, but it’s better than nothing.”

“Of course it’s a good thing. The town just needs to have faith in you.”

“It’s been ten years. There’s not much faith left to go around.”

“Well, what about you? Do you think you can do it? Bring them home?”

She pauses for a second, but nods. “Yes. I do.”

“Then that’s good enough for me. That settles it.”

She gives him a look and tilts her head, confused. “Settles what, exactly?”

“I think I’d like to stay here. In Phoenix Drop. At least until everyone returns.”

“Oh!” She smiles, but took another moment to process and “Oh.” Her face drops. “I- I mean that’s great, I’m glad you’d like to stay, but- this could take years. Decades. Centuries, even. You could be long dead by the time everyone is back here.”

“That’s fine. It’s worth the wait.”

She was startled by his ease in acceptance. “That’s- I mean- you could-“ she takes a breath to calm herself. “Alright. Welcome to Phoenix Drop, Mr. Zvahl.”

~~~

She had agreed to take him out to the portal if he would do some work for her in return. Nothing too strenuous, she wasn’t cruel, but it was nice to have help every once in a while.

For as good as he was in navigating the forest, he knew next to nothing about the plant life within it. Or plant life in general. She spent a solid ten minutes explaining to him what they were looking for, “Four leaves, notched edges, somewhat pointy at the ends. You’ll know you have the right plant if the base of the leaf is much thicker than the edges.” His understanding seemed to be shaky at best, but he didn’t want to waste more time when they were supposed to be gathering. And so he wandered north, she went a bit south, and hoped that he had at least a basic understanding of what they were looking for.

She hadn’t found too many- but she figured as much. It took some time to get to the better spots where the plant often grew in, which they had instead spent observing the portal (as if she didn’t spend enough time on that blasted thing already). So she paid it no mind when he was late meeting back up by a couple minutes. And then ten went past. Then fifteen. It was just enough time to make her start to worry when she’d spotted him returning. That was another odd thing about him, sometimes he was easier to spot with your eyes than to notice with your ears. He was oddly quiet, inhumanly stealthy. She’d wanted to say he was just good at that sort of thing, but what kind of person can disappear in a forest but can’t tell an acorn from a rock? Either he was oddly talented, or there was something even odder going on here, and it bugged her a bit too much.

Her mind was taken off the question when he’d stopped in front of her and she got a good look at him. She understood now why he was late- he seemed uncomfortable, and kept shifting the rather large pile of plants he gathered around. It was a bit hard to tell with the gloves he wore, but she swore she could see splotches of red creeping up his arms.

“Is this stuff we’re gathering… supposed to be itchy?”

And just like that, her suspicions were confirmed. “Well- yes, that is normal for that plant. But it’s also not the plant I told you to gather.”

“It’s not?” He said, looking down at the bundles of leaves in his arms.

“No, it isn’t. I sent you to gather lushsprout. The plants you’re holding look like poison ivy.”

A blank expression slowly grew on his face as he stared through the plant he’d gathered and into the middle distance. A look Zoey could only describe as regret took hold, and he dropped everything he had spent so long gathering as the name finally registered in his brain.

“One moment.” he said and rushed off in the direction of what Zoey could only assume was the nearest water source, a desperate attempt to wash off the red splotches that had already begun to form on his skin. Zoey couldn’t help but snort- it was the most emoted she had seen him ever, and yet it was all so comical.

Well, there was nothing comical about poison ivy, she supposed. It was mildly annoying at best, and painful at worst- but judging by his seeming unawareness she figured he would be alright this time. It would certainly make a good story for later, at least. They had done enough herb gathering for the day.

~~~

They made their way back to Phoenix Drop, recuperating at Aphmau’s house. He washed his hands and arms once again, as well as his gloves in order to make sure they were completely poison-ivy-free. (He’d gathered too much to be completely unscathed, but it was something he could deal with.) Zoey made him tea once again, and Vylad didn’t have the heart to turn her down. Of all the citizens of Phoenix Drop, he’d grown to like her and Dante the most.

She was kind and thoughtful, and understanding of his quiet demeanor. Where Dante often barged in and forced conversation, Zoey understood the importance of silence. They hadn’t physically talked much, though he discovered that he’d somewhat enjoyed just hanging out around her, helping her gather herbs, looking at her miniature garden, whatever trivial way they decided to pass the time. She was certainly more suspicious of him than Dante was (so perhaps she was smarter too), but Vylad figured it was justified and tried to not let it bother him much.

In a strange turn of events, he ended up the one to break the silence.

~~~

“...Just how often does Kawaii~Chan bake?”

“Well, she’s been doing it less often lately, since she’s got a child to look after now, but…”

“So not too often, then?”

She could’ve sworn he sounded almost disappointed. “Gods no, Kawaii~Chan is an unstoppable force when it comes to cooking. The day there is a force strong enough to prevent her is probably the day the world ends.”

She chuckled a bit at her own joke, Zvahl never laughed (or reacted much to anything at all, she’d noticed), so she did for both of them. Maybe it was a bit conceited, but in her eyes it let them both enjoy it, even if he was reluctant to show such feelings. “Why, were you hoping to get some of her sweets yourself?”

“Uh-”

“Have you ever even had her cooking? It’s very good, I’m just not sure why you’d be so interested…”

“Yes, I did. At that breakfast, about a week ago.”

“You’ve been craving her cooking for a week? ”

“Well-”

Any form of excuse was interrupted by more of her laughter, this time it was entirely for herself. Was he so reserved that it had taken him a week to ask about something as trivial as baking? She glanced over him once again to make sure she wasn’t missing anything- only finding what she decided was a hint of embarrassment. He opened his mouth to speak, and she nearly found herself laughing again when he closed it and glanced away.

She stifled her laughter to save him from any more embarrassment, and gave him a knowing wink. “Don’t worry, I’ll put in a good word with her for you if you want. She loves to bake after all- I’m sure she’d be happy to make you something.”

It was muffled by the scarf which most of his face had retreated into, but through the cloth she swore she heard him give a mumbled, “... Thank you...”

Perhaps she was wrong. He had plenty of emotion. Zoey would just need to learn where to look.

~~~

[beanarie]

past & pending 3

this is for @stele3 whose lovely comment led to a somewhat mostly done chapter 1. <3 there’s a bunch more written, but none of it’s going on ao3 until i know how to pull the rest together. the rest of the series (post-finale, everyone’s in love) is here.

Welcome to the McGraw-Hamilton Bed and Breakfast, where no one ever calls ahead for reservations.

 ~~~

They watch the wagon approach for several long moments before Thomas's eyes grow almost impossibly wide and he comes out with it. "That couldn't be our Silver."

Thomas has never seen Silver bare-faced or walking with a boot that obscures, at first glance, that there's anything missing. It's strangely less jarring to see him like this than it is to see him looking like this and limping towards them, as if James expected him to still have his leg.

As he opens his mouth to call out a greeting, a small head pops up from the back of the wagon. For a moment James thinks... but no.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," Thomas says, "but that child is entirely-"

"Too old," James agrees. They watch her throw her arms around Silver so he can help her to the ground. She seems to be somewhere in that middle space between five and ten. Her skin is darker than he remembers Madi's being. Not theirs.

Another head pops up, this one belonging to an adult. Thomas makes a noise. "Is that-"

"No." James frowns as Silver guides her out of the wagon as well. "I have no idea who that woman is."

Silver tips his chin in their direction. "Everyone?" he says, projecting his voice. Four more emerge from the wagon, a man and three boys of varying sizes. "Meet Thomas and James."

James stares until Silver looks at least marginally shamed. "Sorry, for not writing," Silver lies. "We couldn't risk a message being intercepted."

"You also couldn't risk us saying no," James says under his breath.

Silver shows nearly all of his teeth. "How are my cats? I'm certain they missed me."

Thomas coughs so he doesn't laugh and cause James to snap and murder someone. "Well! I guess I'm dressing another chicken for dinner. Two more, perhaps?"

~ "We're seeking sanctuary," Silver explains, his mouth half full of stewed chicken. "Not here, of course. We have an idea of where to find Esther's mother." They're not all related. That's clear from their interactions. There appears to be a platonic connection between Esther and Obi, the two adults, and the middle boy looks to be Obi's son.  "As for Felix and Andres," Silver continues, tilting his head toward the end of the table, where the largest boy sits with the smallest. "We, ah, picked them up along the way. Does that description feel accurate to you, Madam? Any objections to my phrasing?"

Esther's lips turn up slightly. She looks about thirty. "None," she says, not rising to what was clearly bait. He was teasing her.

After supper, after the washing up, everyone gathers in the parlor and their guests form a wonky, expectant semi-circle around Silver. Story time. James shouldn't be surprised. Children must provide an even more receptive ear than a crew of filthy, brutal, goat-fucking onanists had.

Silver tells of the fight for survival of a sparrow in the grips of a hawk. It's full of hair-raising chases and last-minute escapes.

"Boom!" He claps two hands together and the young girl sits up straighter. "A bolt of lightning hit the hawk, ending his journey in split second. He fell to the ground just steps from where I stood, stone dead, cooked, and even dressed for dinner. The shock of the lightning caused his feathers to flee from his body."

His audience begins to object, the children squirming and laughing. "Stop, please," Obi says, amusement and pain equally evident in his voice.

"On the soul of my dear Grandfather Solomon, when that bird fell he was more naked than the day he emerged from his egg. I have never eaten so well so easily in my life."

Esther scoffs and says nothing.

Felix turns to his brother and asks him a question in Creole. Andres nods and looks to Silver. "The sparrow?"

"Oh, Miss Sparrow took full advantage of her captor's misfortune. She saw her opening, and she took it. She flew away with lightning at her tail-feathers and never looked back."

~

The crash of Silver's fake leg hitting the floor disturbs the quiet within seconds of James closing the door. He's breathing hard, his eyes closed. "Six days," he says, rolling his shoulders and grimacing.

"Have you not taken it off at all?"

He opens his eyes and laughs sheepishly. "Honestly, I'm a little afraid to look."

"You could have removed it hours ago."

"That-" Silver waves a hand at the floor. "-is not going back on for quite some time and I didn't relish the idea of hopping about the rest of the evening." "What became of your crutch?"

"Giving indigestion to a whale, sprouting roots in the first stage of becoming a tree that will outlast us all, reading Aeschylus and Homer at fucking Cambridge. Does it matter?"

James finishes rummaging around in the trunk and rises with a laugh.

Silver narrows his eyes. "What is that?" He lifts a hand to object. "Before you start, yes, I'm fully cognizant of what that is, but, just. James. You did not buy me a crutch."

"You're correct. I did not buy it." James looks down at the crutch in his left hand and lifts a shoulder. Silver blinks once, then freezes. "Seemed a better use of my time than repairing the kitchen table again."

No response.

"Do you not agree?"

Silver remains still as a Grecian statue.

James sighs. "All right."

A smile pulls at one corner of Silver's mouth. "Well," he says. "It's no declaring war against the British empire in my name. But it'll do."

James swears under his breath. The curse he is under, that could not have been cast after he did anything to deserve it. He would have remembered something so significant, he would have noticed, and he would have taken steps to account for it. It must have been long, long ago. A malevolent figure emerging from the sea, finding his mother, and placing its ghostly finger on him while still inside her womb. Reaching out to his fluttering, thimble-sized heart and proclaiming in a ghastly wheeze most mortals could not hear, Room for shameless fucking miscreants only.

"You were planning on letting me see it, no?" Silver beckons lazily. As soon as James gets within range, a callused hand covers his and tugs, pulling him closer. Silver's fingers ghost over his brow-bone, reverent, and James considers thanking the sea witch after all. "Oh," Silver breathes, "I have missed you."

"Status report, Mr. McGraw?"

James pulls away to check that Thomas closed the door fully behind him. "He's being sincere, so I'd estimate we have about three minutes until exhaustion claims him for the night." They hadn't discussed where he would be sleeping, however, the room they still think of as his is now taken by Esther and the girl. With Obi and... smaller Obi, then the Creole brothers occupying another two rooms, there are still a few options for Silver. Neither Thomas nor Silver will likely voice these other options, so James certainly will not.

Thomas joins them from the other side of the bed. Silver's lips part in a surprised yet grateful moan, and then James spies Thomas's nimble fingers kneading his left shoulder.

"Trying to speed the process along?" Silver murmurs.

"Removing you from the conversation before your compromised self reveals something you may regret later."

The smile Silver favors James with is almost shy. "You know, sometimes it's fairly easy to see why you love him."

James meets his eyes then grins wickedly at Thomas over his shoulder. "Thomas, your efforts come too late."

"What, that? That was hardly..."

James eases away from the bed, rolling his eyes, and seems to catch something out the window. Something is moving out there.

Silver keeps going, though his tone grows vaguer by the word. "Khanyi, the girl, she may wonder where I am. She and Madi are kin of a sort and she seems to have appointed herself my minder."

"If she should rise before you, I'll take her to meet the animals," Thomas says. "They are marginally more entertaining to look after."

"Obi should have something for the children to do. He was a schoolteacher on the island. He's been subjecting them all to twice daily lessons."

"We have some books he may find beneficial."

"Esther will want to go hunting. Andres can go with her, but Felix and Obi's boy, Seydou, no. They'll lose their way chasing after baby deer and get themselves eaten by an alligator."

"How long do you plan on sleeping?" Thomas says, as James exits the room.

James approaches the front door, feeling a bit of a fool. A knock banishes thoughts of delusion from his head. So he did not imagine what he saw.

The woman at the other side is soaked to the bone, shivering, illuminated by lightning at her back.

James breathes out. "Madi."

"James," she says, using the manner in which he closed his letters.

Upon returning to the master bedroom, he gets past the threshold and simply... stops. Silver is dead to the world, his head tipped back and his mouth wide open. Like as not he'll be snoring soon. Thomas sits next to him with his ankles crossed, repairing a hole in someone's trousers with a needle and thread. James keenly wishes he were more practiced at painting human figures. Still, his brain, helpful as ever, catalogues details as though preparing to put them on a canvas. The crease of the pillow- James's pillow- under Silver's bad leg. The furrow of concentration splitting Thomas's brow.

"Is something happening?" Thomas asks, and it's enough to spur James out of his reverie and over to the armoire.

"We have an additional houseguest."

"Truly?" Thomas asks, as though they already host the world entire.

James grabs a blanket and one of his shirts. "You should put the kettle on."

~

In the first few minutes, they exchange standard pleasantries, she forwards her compliments on their home, and they manage to establish that everyone else arrived safely (plus two) and no, she did not travel all this way on her own.

"My escort chose to remain in town," she says. "But I have to say, if I had no escort, it would be no one's business save my own."

Thomas presses his lips together before he rallies. "This is quite true, Miss Scott. I do hope we did not offend."

Madi sighs quietly and adjusts the blanket around her. She looks diminished in his shirt and her damp trousers, small and miserable and uncertain.

"I am glad to see you," James ventures, heartened when he gets a tiny smile out of her.

"You've said," she points out, not unkindly.

"The sentiment is no less genuine for having been repeated."

"Might we get you something to eat, dear lady?" Thomas nearly begs, his sense of empathy going haywire from having a lovely woman in his kitchen visibly fighting back tears. "Dinner has been handily polished off, but we have bread and cheese. And fruit. I could fry some eggs?"

"Madi?"

Esther stands at the doorway and Madi all but jumps, dropping the blanket on the floor. She pulls herself together with an almost audible effort as Esther asks question after question in a language he does not know well enough to identify at rapid fire speeds.

Their hands inch ever closer and, well. That is not what he was expecting.

[theadmiringbog]

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you

RULE 4 / Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

RULE 5 / Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

RULE 6 / Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

RULE 8 / Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

--

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position. Its original brain just isn’t sophisticated to manage the transformation from king to bottom dog without virtually complete dissolution and regrowth. Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after a serious defeat in romance or career may feel some sense of kinship with the once successful crustacean.

--

Among the chimp troupes he studied, males who were successful in the longer term had to buttress their physical prowess with more sophisticated attributes. Even the most brutal chimp despot can be taken down, after all, by two opponents, each three-quarters as mean. In consequence, males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower-status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to the troupe’s females and their infants. The political ploy of baby-kissing is literally millions of years old.                

--

“In my kingdom,” as the Red Queen tells Alice in Wonderland, “you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.”                

--

If you have a high status, on the other hand, the counter’s cold, pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe, and that you are well buttressed with social support. It thinks the chance that something will damage you is low and can be safely discounted. Change might be opportunity, instead of disaster.                

--

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely. This often happens in the case of people, now adults, who were viciously bullied during childhood or adolescence. They become anxious and easily upset. They shield themselves with a defensive crouch, and avoid the direct eye contact interpretable as a dominance challenge. This means that the damage caused by the bullying (the lowering of status and confidence) can continue, even after the bullying has ended.                

--

When the wakening occurs—when once-naïve people recognize in themselves the seeds of evil and monstrosity, and see themselves as dangerous (at least potentially)— their fear decreases. They develop more self-respect. Then, perhaps, they begin to resist oppression. They see that they have the ability to withstand, because they are terrible too. They see they can and must stand up, because they begin to understand how genuinely monstrous they will become, otherwise, feeding on their resentment, transforming it into the most destructive of wishes. To say it again: There is very little difference between the capacity for mayhem and destruction, integrated, and strength of character. This is one of the most difficult lessons of life.                

--

Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you’re not—but if you are, you don’t have to continue in that mode. Maybe you just have a bad habit. Maybe you’re even just a collection of bad habits. Nonetheless, even if you came by your poor posture honestly—even if you were unpopular or bullied at home or in grade school—it’s not necessarily appropriate now. Circumstances change. If you slump around, with the same bearing that characterizes a defeated lobster, people will assign you a lower status, and the old counter that you share with crustaceans, sitting at the very base of your brain, will assign you a low dominance number. Then your brain will not produce as much serotonin. This will make you less happy, and more anxious and sad, and more likely to back down when you should stand up for yourself. It will also decrease the probability that you will get to live in a good neighbourhood, have access to the highest quality resources, and obtain a healthy, desirable mate. It will render you more likely to abuse cocaine and alcohol, as you live for the present in a world full of uncertain futures. It will increase your susceptibility to heart disease, cancer and dementia. All in all, it’s just not good.                

--

Thus strengthened and emboldened, you may choose to embrace Being, and work for its furtherance and improvement. Thus strengthened, you may be able to stand, even during the illness of a loved one, even during the death of a parent, and allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair. Thus emboldened, you will embark on the voyage of your life, let your light shine, so to speak, on the heavenly hill, and pursue your rightful destiny. Then the meaning of your life may be sufficient to keep the corrupting influence of mortal despair at bay. Then you may be able to accept the terrible burden of the World, and find joy.                

--

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.                

--

You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?”                

--

RULE 3 / MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU                 

When people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better. Freud called this a “repetition compulsion.”                

--

Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion?                

--

Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar of mayonnaise and vodka, “That’s a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy!”               

--

RULE 4 / COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY                 

You are either a success, a comprehensive, singular, over-all good thing, or its opposite, a failure, a comprehensive, singular, irredeemably bad thing. The words imply no alternative and no middle ground. However, in a world as complex as ours, such generalizations (really, such failure to differentiate) are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or even malevolent analysis. There are vital degrees and gradations of value obliterated by this binary system, and the consequences are not good.                

--

The world allows for many ways of Being. If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another. You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, weaknesses and situation. Furthermore, if changing games does not work, you can invent a new one.                

--

But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.                

--

When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here’s how it operates: First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power). Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavourably with someone truly stellar, within that domain. It can take that final step even further, using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life.                

--

You set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning. Then you ask yourself, “What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward?” Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that damn coffee, in triumph. Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different. Now you’re aiming for something higher. Now you’re wishing on a star. Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you’re learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That’s worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.                

--

What would your life look like, if it were better? What would Life Itself look like? What does “better” even mean?                

--

Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural and biological. You don’t understand how what you want—and, therefore, what you see—is conditioned by the immense, abysmal, profound past.                

--

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.                

--

Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you, that will not let you be, which you could fix, that you would fix. You can find such somethings by asking yourself (as if you genuinely want to know) three questions: “What is it that is bothering me?” “Is that something I could fix?” and “Would I actually be willing to fix it?”                

--

If you find that the answer is “no,” to any or all of the questions, then look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.                

--

What if you allowed yourself a glass of wine with dinner, or curled up on the sofa and read, or watched a stupid movie, as a reward? What if you instructed your wife, or your husband, to say “good job” after you fixed whatever you fixed? Would that motivate you? The people from whom you want thanks might not be very proficient in offering it, to begin with, but that shouldn’t stop you. People can learn,                

--

Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What                

--

You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.                

--

Do this every day, for a while. Then do it for the rest of your life.                

--

You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself. Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good. Now, your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. Even a man on a sinking ship can be happy when he clambers aboard a lifeboat! And who knows where he might go, in the future. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully….                

--

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.                

--

RULE 5  /  DO NOT LET YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM                 

Children are damaged when those charged with their care, afraid of any conflict or upset, no longer dare to correct them, and leave them without guidance. I can recognize such children on the street. They are doughy and unfocused and vague. They are leaden and dull instead of golden and bright. They are uncarved blocks, trapped in a perpetual state of waiting-to-be.                

--

RULE 6  /  SET YOUR HOUSE IN PERFECT ORDER BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE THE WORLD                 

if one parent abused three children, and each of those children had three children, and so on, then there would be three abusers the first generation, nine the second, twenty-seven the third, eighty-one the fourth—and so on exponentially. After twenty generations, more than ten billion would have suffered childhood abuse: more people than currently inhabit the planet. But instead, abuse disappears across generations. People constrain its spread. That’s a testament to the genuine dominance of good over evil in the human heart.                

--

When the hurricane hit New Orleans, and the town sank under the waves, was that a natural disaster? The Dutch prepare their dikes for the worst storm in ten thousand years. Had New Orleans followed that example, no tragedy would have occurred. It’s not that no one knew. The Flood Control Act of 1965 mandated improvements in the levee system that held back Lake Pontchartrain. The system was to be completed by 1978. Forty years later, only 60 percent of the work had been done. Willful blindness and corruption took the city down.                

--

A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known—that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark. And the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).                

--

The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God’s goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge.                

--

RULE 7  /  PURSUE WHAT IS MEANINGFUL (NOT WHAT IS EXPEDIENT)                

for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Genesis 3:16-19. KJV) What in the world should be done about that? The simplest, most obvious, and most direct answer? Pursue pleasure. Follow your impulses. Live for the moment. Do what’s expedient. Lie, cheat, steal, deceive, manipulate—but don’t get caught. In an ultimately meaningless universe, what possible difference could it make?                

--

Benjamin Franklin once suggested that a newcomer to a neighbourhood ask a new neighbour to do him or her a favour, citing an old maxim: He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged. In Franklin’s opinion, asking someone for something (not too extreme, obviously) was the most useful and immediate invitation to social interaction. Such asking on the part of the newcomer provided the neighbour with an opportunity to show him- or herself as a good person, at first encounter.                

--

RULE 8  /   TELL THE TRUTH—OR, AT LEAST, DON'T LIE                 

Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices. They are different pathways through life. They are utterly different ways of existing.                

--

Typical calculated ends might include “to impose my ideological beliefs,” “to prove that I am (or was) right,” “to appear competent,” “to ratchet myself up the dominance hierarchy,” “to avoid responsibility” (or its twin, “to garner credit for others’ actions”), “to be promoted,” “to attract the lion’s share of attention,” “to ensure that everyone likes me,” “to garner the benefits of martyrdom,” “to justify my cynicism,” “to rationalize my antisocial outlook,” “to minimize immediate conflict,” “to maintain my naïveté,” “to capitalize on my vulnerability,” “to always appear as the sainted one,” or (this one is particularly evil) “to ensure that it is always my unloved child’s fault.” These are all examples of what Sigmund Freud’s compatriot, the lesser-known Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler, called “life-lies.”                

--

What did she know about her fifty-two-year-old self, when still a teenager? Even now, many years later, she has only the vaguest, lowest-resolution idea of her post-work Eden. She refuses to notice. What did her life mean, if that initial goal was wrong? She’s afraid of opening Pandora’s box, where all the troubles of the world reside. But hope is in there, too. Instead, she warps her life to fit the fantasies of a sheltered adolescent.                

--

A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie.                

--

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. That does not only mean that you suppress who you are, although it also means that. It means that so much of what you could be will never be forced by necessity to come forward. This is a biological truth, as well as a conceptual truth. When you explore boldly, when you voluntarily confront the unknown, you gather information and build your renewed self out of that information. That is the conceptual element. However, researchers have recently discovered that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed (or places itself) in a new situation. These genes code for new proteins. These proteins are the building blocks for new structures in the brain. This means that a lot of you is still nascent, in the most physical of senses, and will not be called forth by stasis. You have to say something, go somewhere and do things to get turned on. And, if not…you remain incomplete, and life is too hard for anyone incomplete.

--

If you’re lucky, and you fail, and you try something new, you move ahead. If that doesn’t work, you try something different again. A minor modification will suffice in fortunate circumstances. It is therefore prudent to begin with small changes, and see if they help. Sometimes, however, the entire hierarchy of values is faulty, and the whole edifice has to be abandoned. The whole game must be changed.

--

Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice. To accept the truth means to sacrifice—and if you have rejected the truth for a long time, then you’ve run up a dangerously large sacrificial debt.                

--

“Did what I want happen? No. Then my aim or my methods were wrong. I still have something to learn.” 

That is the voice of authenticity. 

“Did what I want happen? No. Then the world is unfair. People are jealous, and too stupid to understand. It is the fault of something or someone else.” 

That is the voice of inauthenticity.                

--

It is not too far from there to “they should be stopped” or “they must be hurt” or “they must be destroyed.” Whenever you hear about something incomprehensibly brutal, such ideas have manifested themselves.                

--

it is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open. You have a direction, but it might be wrong. You have a plan, but it might be ill-formed. You may have been led astray by your own ignorance—and, worse, by your own unrevealed corruption. You must make friends, therefore, with what you don’t know, instead of what you know. You must remain awake to catch yourself in the act. You must remove the beam in your own eye, before you concern yourself with the mote in your brother’s. And in this way, you strengthen your own spirit, so it can tolerate the burden of existence, and you rejuvenate the state.                

--

Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.                

--

You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.                

--

In His human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.                

--

Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot.                

--

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.                

--

If you bend everything totally, blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal, and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you, and the world, better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth. If, instead, you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress. If you allow yourself to be informed by the reality manifesting itself, as you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change. You will reorient yourself, sometimes gradually, and sometimes suddenly and radically. Imagine: you                

--

Perhaps it is better to conceptualize it this way: Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal—an ambition, and a purpose—to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta-goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves. The meta-goal could be “live in truth.”                

--

If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise.       

--

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not “to remember the past.” It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over. I thought,                

--

If I had been the adherent of a left-wing, social-justice ideology, I would have told her the first story. If I had been the adherent of a conservative ideology, I would have told her the second. And her responses after having been told either the first or the second story would have proved to my satisfaction and hers that the story I had told her was true—completely, irrefutably true. And that would have been advice.                

--

You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up.     

--

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

We see rocks, because we can throw them, and clouds, because they can rain on us, and apples, to eat, and the automobiles of other people, to get in our way and annoy us. We see tools and obstacles, not objects or things.                

--

Here’s the terrible truth about such matters: every single voluntarily unprocessed and uncomprehended and ignored reason for marital failure will compound and conspire and will then plague that betrayed and self-betrayed woman for the rest of her life. The same goes for her husband. All she—he—they—or we—must do to ensure such an outcome is nothing: don’t notice, don’t react, don’t attend, don’t discuss, don’t consider, don’t work for peace, don’t take responsibility. Don’t confront the chaos and turn it into order—just wait, anything but naïve and innocent, for the chaos to rise up and engulf you instead.                

--

Why refuse to specify, when specifying the problem would enable its solution? Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. Because to specify the problem is to allow yourself to know what you want, say, from friend or lover—and then you will know, precisely and cleanly, when you don’t get it, and that will hurt, sharply and specifically.                

--

But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future—and the alternative to that single sharp pain is the dull ache of continued hopelessness and vague failure and the sense that time, precious time, is slipping by.

--                

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Women have a strong proclivity to marry across or up the economic dominance hierarchy. They prefer a partner of equal or greater status. This holds true cross-culturally.184 The same does not hold, by the way, for men, who are perfectly willing to marry across or down (as the Pew data indicate), although they show a preference for somewhat younger mates.                

--

Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. The winners are, of course, more likely to justify the hierarchy and the losers to criticize it. But (1) the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy (as some will be better and some worse at that pursuit no matter what it is) and (2) it is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning.                

--

We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself—and then there would be nothing worth living for.                

--

We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions.                

--

There are only two major reasons for resentment: being taken advantage of (or allowing yourself to be taken advantage of), or whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up. If you’re resentful, look for the reasons.                

--

Agreeable, compassionate, empathic, conflict-averse people (all those traits group together) let people walk on them, and they get bitter. They sacrifice themselves for others, sometimes excessively, and cannot comprehend why that is not reciprocated.      

--      

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

I started with my thoughts about my son. She had asked, like everyone in her situation, “Why my husband? Why me? Why this?” My realization of the tight interlinking between vulnerability and Being was the best answer I had for her. I told her an old Jewish story, which I believe is part of the commentary on the Torah. It begins with a question, structured like a Zen koan. Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack?211 The answer? Limitation. If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. That idea has helped me deal with the terrible fragility of Being.                

--

Perhaps that is true prayer: the question, “What have I done wrong, and what can I do now to set things at least a little bit more right?”

[prissyhalliwell]

Fairy Gardener prompt: Rumple takes Belle with him on a deal but somehow it doesn't go as he intended and he's much more lenient than he usually is and absolutely no one got turned into a snail. (Bonus points if she hides out in his pocket and talks to him while he's dealing and the person thinks the Dark One is extra crazy today.)

Also on AO3

CHAPTER SEVEN 

Jekyll’s lab looked much the same as it had the other times Rumplestiltskin had visited. The lab was spotless and organized within an inch of its life. He toyed with the idea of having Jekyll organize Jefferson’s supplies, but figured that much order would give the Hatter an aneurysm.

They had followed Jekyll up the narrow staircase into his laboratory ten minutes ago. Since then, it had taken almost all of Rumplestiltskin’s attention to keep Belle from jumping out of his pocket to examine the doctor’s equipment more closely.

He supposed he couldn’t blame her. Technology like this was foreign to the Enchanted Forest, and only worked here because of the spells he had woven over them. He’d seen the potential in Jekyll during his first visit and had agreed to give the man the assistance he required to complete his serum.

What Jekyll didn’t know, and Rumplestiltskin had no intention of telling him, was that he’d had his eye on the doctor for a while now. Rumors had been circulating for months about a mad alchemist who had escaped from another realm after some trouble with a potion. Though the words “scientist” and “serum” would be more accurate, the rest of the information had been sound. It hadn’t taken much to convince Jefferson to confide in Jekyll one night at the local tavern about the powerful sorcerer who made impossible things possible, and three nights later, Jekyll - desperate and sleep deprived - had called upon him to make a deal. Not that the man knew exactly what the deal was of course, but that was hardly Rumplestiltskin’s problem.

“I take it you’ve f-f-found the final ingredient then,” Jekyll asked, pacing nervously in front of a window at the far end of the room. The man had subconsciously put as much distance between himself and the Dark One as possible. It was a common enough occurrence that Rumplestiltskin didn’t even bother teasing the doctor about it.

Besides, he was hoping to keep this visit as brief as possible. Belle was behaving herself at the moment, but there was no telling what mischief the little fairy would cause if she got bored.

“Wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t, dearie,” Rumplestiltskin replied waspishly. He skipped a few steps closer to Jekyll’s workbench to look at the solution bubbling there. Without the final ingredient, the liquid was a sickly-looking green color. Hardly appetizing, in his opinion. Then again, he wasn’t the one who would be drinking it. At least, not yet.

“Pssst,” Belle hissed. “Don’t forget to ask for something in return.”

Rumplestiltskin glared down into his pocket. “I have done this a few times, you know.”

She shrugged. “You hadn’t mentioned anything yet so - ”

He sniffed. “That’s where you amateurs make your mistake. Nine times out of ten, it’s better to deal for something in the future.” He gestured a thumb back towards Jekyll. “If these idiots had anything worth bartering now, they wouldn’t be desperate enough to call me.”

Jekyll’s voice carried from across the room. “S-s-sorry, did you say something?”Rumplestiltskin raised his voice. “Merely talking to the potion, dearie. It helps keep the solution calm and balanced.”

Belle slapped her hands over her mouth as a giggle escaped her. 

“Did the serum just…laugh?” Jekyll’s voice sounded bewildered. 

“Like I said,” Rumplestiltskin sneered, his voice dripping with disdain, “it needs calming down.”

He beckoned Jekyll forward, holding back a chuckle as the man visibly steeled himself to approach him. With a flourish of his hand, Rumplestiltskin withdrew the vial.

Jekyll looked at it dubiously. “Flower petals?”

“What? Not dead enough for you?” He smiled as Jekyll flinched. “Trust me, dearie. I’ve made a potion or two over the years.” Uncorking the vial, he let several of the crushed petals fall into the beaker holding the solution. He saw Belle peek over the top of his pocket, and the three of them held their breath for what felt like an eternity until the serum turned from green to a dark, blood red.

He heard Belle gasp even as Jekyll let out a whoop of joy beside him.

“It’s finished! We’ve done it.” Grabbing the beaker, Jekyll held it up to the light. “My god, it’s beautiful.”

Beautiful seemed a stretch, Rumplestiltskin thought. The violent red color of the potion was one he’d never seen in nature, giving it an unnatural aura as if went against the laws of nature itself. He supposed it did in many ways; the things they were about to separate were never meant to be apart.

“Well, what are you waiting for? Bottom’s up, dearie.”

Jekyll turned wide, bespectacled eyes to him in horror. “Not without the proper testing! I must make sure the solution won’t be toxic to drink.”

Rumplestiltskin fought the urge to sigh. “If it turns out to be poisonous, I can easily make you an antidote. Consider it a perk to having an all-powerful sorcerer as your business partner.”

“But what if it kills me instantly?”

Feeling his patience all but evaporate, Rumplestiltskin bared his teeth at Jekyll. “Then I’ll make the antidote quickly.”

Jekyll gulped, looking from the malevolent-looking potion to Rumplestiltskin and back. “Well, I suppose when you put it that way…” He made a gesture over his chest that Rumplestiltskin assumed was either religious or superstitious, and threw back the serum in one large gulp.

The change was immediate. Jekyll’s entire body began to writhe, and the empty beaker crashed to the floor as he doubled over. A pain-filled groan left his lips as he sank to the ground, clutching his stomach.

“Do something!” Belle pleaded, but Rumplestiltskin merely stared in horrified fascination at the sight before him. He could no sooner stop the transformation then he could predict its exact outcome. He had a fairly strong hunch as to what would happen to Jekyll, but when unknown science and magic collided, it was always best to use a guinea pig first.

Jekyll’s skin started to ripple and he began to claw at his arms, his chest, anywhere that he could reach. Then, in what was one of the strangest things Rumplestiltskin had witnessed in his 300 years of life, Jekyll split in two - one version of him falling forward onto the floor in a sprawl while another fell backwards onto his ass.

For the space of a heartbeat, no one said anything. Then, all four of them - Belle, Rumplestiltskin, and the two Jekyll’s - started screaming at once.

Ten minutes and three calming spells later, the four were gathered around a cleared workbench as Rumplestiltskin ran some magical tests on the two clones. Belle perched on the edge of the table furthest from the two Jekyll’s, eyeing them warily. The two men ignored her for the most part, suspicious enough of each other that they didn’t seem overly worried about the strange little person who had popped out of Rumplestiltskin’s pocket halfway through their separation.

From what his diagnostic spells were telling him, the two Jekyll’s were nearly identical physiologically, though both differed in appearance just enough to convince him that neither was the original Jekyll. The doctor had literally been split in half. The only real question was which traits belonged to which clone.

As hesitant as they were around each other, neither version seemed overly fond of Rumplestiltskin at the moment either, most likely due to his involvement in their split. This wouldn’t have bothered him much had it not resulted in the two being even more reticent than their predecessor. As much as he wanted to stay and observe them, it seemed this experiment was going to take a bit longer than he had anticipated.

“Well, I suppose that’s enough for today,” Rumplestiltskin said, forcing fake cheer into his voice. “I’m sure you boys need your rest after such a backbreaking day.” When no one seemed to find his quip funny, he scowled. He was certain that two hundred years ago that joke would have gotten him at least a chuckle or two.

Though she hadn’t laughed, Belle had perked up at his mention of finishing for the day. She flew over to him, settling herself in his pocket without a word.

“I’ll be checking in on you gentlemen from time to time,” he said. “Do let me know if any…surprises arise. You know how I take a vested interest in your work.”

One man nodded slowly, avoiding Rumplestiltskin’s eyes. The other met his gaze squarely, giving a short, decisive nod. Filing the information away for later, he turned on his heel and left the lab.

Belle was silent as they made their way out into the street and back toward the city’s square. He let her stew for several minutes until he spoke.

“If you think any harder, your tiny brain is liable to explode.”

“What?” Belle asked, startled. “I - oh, I don’t know. I suppose I’m just confused.”

He nodded. “About the serum?”

She shook her head. “No, I think I understand that. Initially, I had no idea, but things started coming together once you started asking them questions afterwards.”

“Yet something’s clearly eating at you, my dear,” Rumplestiltskin said, noticing the way Belle was gnawing on her bottom lip. “Spit it out.”

“It’s just - something about this feels weird to me.”

He grinned. “I wouldn’t worry if I were you. Jekyll has that effect on most people.”

“No, not that. I can’t shake the feeling that something about this seems familiar.”

“Hmm, I never suspected Blue of throwing those kinds of parties. It’s a wonder the Enchanted Forest is still standing.”

Belle rolled her eyes, but her face broke into a grin at his quip. Her spirits seemed to lift after that and she began to question him more about how he’d met Jekyll. He answered her questions as they walked towards the marketplace, his pace unhurried as he gave her a somewhat edited version of his interactions with the doctor.

“I can’t imagine how much self-hatred it must take to do that to yourself,” Belle said. “What person in their right mind would want to rip away part of themselves like that?”

Rumplestiltskin shifted uncomfortably. “No idea, dearie.”

She shook her head. “I’m sure I’ll remember eventually. It’s like something’s hovering just out of reach and I can’t put my finger on it.”

“It is a rather tiny finger,” he joked, before feeling a hard poke to his chest. “Ouch.” He looked down to find Belle smirking up at him.

“Seems to works well enough.”

He scowled. “Aren’t fairies supposed to be nice? You’re rather violent.”

“And you’re rude!”

“Well, I could be much worse.”

“Hmm, that is true. But you’re not.”

They had finally reached the outer edge of the marketplace and Rumplestiltskin’s eyes fell on an old stone fountain. “We shall see about that,” he thought to himself, a sly grin spreading across his face.

Two fairies were flitting about the fountain, buzzing through the air like giant gnats. There were always a few here during market days; it seemed to be a favorite spot for the vermin. As he watched, the two transformed to human size, sitting on the edge of the fountain to soak their feet in the water. Such a feat of magic clearly marked them as one of the higher order of fairies, a distinction which came with some ridiculous title he could never remember - ‘protectors’ or ‘godmothers’, he thought.

Unlike common garden pixies like Belle, whose magic was often limited to helping flowers or crops grow, those of the upper classes were able to wield more extensive magic, such as changing their size at will or transforming living or inanimate objects, especially when aided by fairy dust. There were of course more nuances to the hierarchy of fairy society, and he’d learned it all long ago when researching the little fleas, but so far he hadn’t found the information useful in his vendetta against Blue.

“Shit,” Belle said, ducking into his pocket.

He saw the two fairies frown at them, whispering furiously to one another. One of the fairies, a blonde clothed in green, he recognized as a close associate of Blue’s.

“Something the matter?” he asked. “I take it they’re not friends of yours?”

“Yeah,” Belle replied hesitantly, her voice muffled by his shirt. “You could say that.”

This gave him pause. To his knowledge, the different echelons of fairies didn’t have much interaction; except for Blue of course, who made it her business to know everything about everybody. Perhaps he’d need to brush up on his knowledge of fairy society, after all. Either way, it seemed his gamble of bringing Belle to the fairy fountain had paid off.

He’d known pushing her for answers wouldn’t result in anything except giving himself a headache. He’d been waiting for her to tip her hand for weeks, watching her closely for any clues to what she was hiding. When that tactic had brought him nothing but irritation, he’d decided to confront her directly, knowing he most likely wouldn’t gain any real answers. But he wanted to see how Belle would respond under pressure and if she would inadvertently let any hints slip, either then or in the future. People who were flustered often went out of their way to make sure they didn’t give anything away, often achieving the opposite of what they intended by overcompensating. It had been time to see how Belle would react when brought face to face with her past. She’d been growing far too comfortable at the Dark Castle; it was time to make her squirm.

“How interesting,” Rumplestiltskin said. With a flick of his hand, they disappeared from the square in a showy puff of purple smoke. There had been no reason to stay any longer. After only a short trip, he was now that much closer to knowing exactly what his little fairy was hiding from him. Which meant he was one step closer to destroying Blue.

[archonreviews]

The Archon’s Review of King Arthur: A Roleplaying Wargame

King Arthur: A Rolplaying Wargame is a grand strategy game designed by NeocoreGames and published by Paradox Interactive. It is a dark time in Britannia. The king, Uther Pendragon, has died, leaving no apparent heir. In the wake of this power vacuum, all the petty kings of the realm have taken up arms against their neighbors in a bid for power and land. Then, Merlin appears with the sword, Excalibur, lodged in a stone in the abbey at Glastonbury. He says his piece, and then Arthur appears out of nowhere to do his thing. Except, when Arthur extricates the sword from the stone, magic returns to Britannia, Merlin disappears, and the Sidhe, the ancient fae, assert themselves, carving out a territory in the Bedegraine forest, just south of Hadrain’s Wall. Britannia is now on the brink of grandiose conflict, and you, as Arthur, the Once and Future King, must decide its fate.

I picked up KAaRPWG mostly on a whim, but I must say that, for the most part, it paid off.There is a lot to like here; although my expectations were not all that high, I was pleasantly surprised.

Let’s start with the lore. If you’re a purist when it comes to Arthurian legends, you may be a bit disappointed. KAaRPWG melds Arthurian legends with a healthy does of Celtic and Irish mythology. You’ve got the sword in the stone (Excalibur in this version, not Caliburn), the Green Knight, all the Knights of the Round Table, the Holy Grail, etc. You’ve also got the Sidhe, the distinction between Seelie and Unseelie fae, the Old Faith of the druids, and a belief in magic, all of which is inspired by old Celtic and Irish myths. The two mythoi actually blend quite well; this is probably the result of a singular aesthetic acting as a very effective backdrop for both sets of myths. There’s a sense here of a blending of time and space, wherein armored knights on horseback seem natural next to the mystical and strange Sidhe. References to the ancient Roman colonies that used to be on Britannia help complete the blend, creating a sense of a far distant past brought temporally forward to scrunch it up against the medieval knights and kingdoms of Britannia. But the Roman stuff works because the ancient, “Old Faith” aesthetic helps place us there temporally. Basically, what I’m trying, and probably failing to say, is that each element of the aesthetic and lore helps hold the others up so that when blended, they fit together perfectly.

^(The Once and Future King, just before everything goes downhill)^

The overworld map is very pretty, although a bit monotone. As we are in Britannia, we can expect mostly forests and grass lands, with rolling hills and a mountain here and there. I had a similar complaint about Eador. Genesis, but this game breaks up the monotony with a quartet of seasons, which pass one by one each turn. I really like the seasons system, and not merely because it adds snow during winter. See, each season actually does something. It’s not just cosmetic, and it’s details like this that really makes me appreciate a game. Dominions 4 and Endless Legend do something similar, but it’s not quite as strategic as it is in this. The year begins in Spring, which is when random quests and disasters appear on the campaign map, which you can then react to by sending your armies to deal with them. During Summer, armies are able to move much farther on the campaign map. The game says that Autumn is when your food comes in, but I don’t think that’s actually the case. Winter does a number of things. First, Winter forces all armies on the overworld to stop and set up camp. No armies can move during Winter. Second, Winter is when your taxes come in, and this is also when your food comes in, possibly because of a bug. Lastly, Winter is when you can interact with your stronghold(s), building new districts, researching new improvements for your kingdom, and managing your economy via the Chancellory, where you enact new laws, set decrees, and trade food for gold and vice versa. Then Spring rolls back around and new random quests appear. The seasons system is a really great way of marrying form and function, and I think it’s pretty neato.

Now, this is a strategy game, and strategy games tend to have playable battles where you can exercise that big ol’ brain of yours. And the combat in this game, well... it’s basically Total War. NOW THIS SENTENCE RIGHT HERE IS FOR ANY LAWYERS THAT HAPPEN TO BE READING; DO NOT TAKE THIS PARAGRAPH OR THIS REVIEW AND USE IT AS A MEANS FOR LITIGATION. I WILL BE VERY CROSS WITH YOU IF I HAPPEN TO FIND OUT THAT ANYONE WAS SUCCESSFULLY SUED BECAUSE OF WHAT I JUST WROTE HERE. LAWYERS, DO NOT USE OR MENTION THIS REVIEW. Right, now that that’s over with; yeah, the gameplay is basically magical Medieval:Total War. You take battalions of troops, march them around the field of battle, and use strategy and tactics to win. Hero characters, such as the Knights of the Round Table, have magical abilities you can call upon to turn the tide of battle, which is a neat addition. Also, individual units don’t have morale, unlike in a Total War game; instead, each side has a morale bar that increases or decreases depending on which side controls victory locations. These locations are things like monuments, stone circles, villages, keeps, ect. Another departure from Total War that I like is that once you’ve won a battle, the enemy army goes away entirely, even if you won via morale rather than extermination. This makes it so that you needn’t chase enemies down across the map after each battle like roaches in a kitchen

^(The first battle in the game. My troops are the ones in armor. Winning!)^

In between battles are quests. As mentioned, some are random, appearing during the spring season. The important ones, however, are related to the plot of the game. These are things like finding and hiring on a Knight of the Round Table, or determining whether the Old Faith or Christianity gains more power, or finding special artifacts. All quests, random and plot-relevant, are carried out via text-based decision trees. Some choices use one or more of a hero’s stats. In these cases, the text will be green if it’s a certain success, blue if the outcome is uncertain, or red if it’s a certain failure. This incentivizes you to have a variety of heroes on hand. It’s a bit of a problem if you need a mageknight and all you have are fightknights. The outcome of quests has various effects, such as gaining you artifacts, changing your morality, giving you more troops, or provoking a battle.

^(One of the early quests. Sir Kay here did a bang-up job of it.)^

I alluded to a morality system in the above paragraph, and this game has not a binary moral choice system, but a quaternary moral choice system. See, in the wake of Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone, magic returns to Britannia, leading to a resurgence of what they call the “Old Faith”, which is worship of the Tuatha de Danaan, the old Irish deities. This causes friction between the believers in this Old Faith, and the followers of the still-new Christianity. Interesting sidenote: In the game, the Welsh are followers of the Old Faith, while the Saxons are the Christian invaders. But in real life, the Welsh had already been Christianized by Saint Joseph of Arimathea and the Irish by Saint Patrick, while the Saxons were so incredibly pagan that Charlemagne felt the need to deliver them the Cross via the sword. In addition to the religious conflict, there’s a virtue axis, each end of which is labeled “Rightful” and “Tyrant”. The game makes a point of stating that Rightful isn’t necessarily good and Tyrant isn’t necessarily evil, and that the axis is meant to measure your commitment to the ideals of chivalry. Although, in practice, benevolent acts increase your Rightful gauge, while malevolent acts do the opposite. Going toward one combination of religion and virtue is advised, as you get new spells, bonuses, and unit choices for doing so, and I also imagine it affects what ending you get.

^(The morality chart. Fun fact, the terms the game uses for Rightful-Old Faith and Tyrant-Old Faith are Seelie and Unseelie respectively. This means that from a religious standpoint, there’s actually three sides you can choose from, Christian, Seelie, and Unseelie. I guess Christianity doesn’t care whether you’re a moral person...?)^

Now, the things I talked about are all very effective and fun, and I like them a lot. But here comes the problems are there are a few. First off, the game is hilariously unstable, especially the further you are into it. The most common bug I found was the game giving me a “Runtime error” during loading screens and crashing to desktop. Sometimes the game even just cuts out after the loading screen, but just after I unpause the game to start a battle, dumping me straight to the desktop. I even encountered a really weird bug where, when I reloaded a save, there was snow on the ground even though it was autumn, and after I hit the “next turn” button, I was prevented from opening the menu to save or quit, and I couldn’t end the turn again. I was stuck in perpetual winter. I mean, I know the Starks were all like “Winter is coming” but I didn’t think it’d stay forever. In fact, these glitches came up so often that I actually did make a print screen and paste it into paint; you remember, the thing I said I wasn’t gonna do in my Fallout 2 review.

^(Fun fact: when I inserted this image, it kept flickering for a second or two before it settled. Hopefully it’s not cursed.)^

Also, the AI isn’t particularly engaging. With a little bit of strategy and good judgement, it’s possible to win a battle with a force half as powerful as your enemy’s. This isn’t to say that the battles aren’t fun or that there isn’t any risk involved, but just that the AI isn’t as amazing as one might desire out of their grand strategy experience.

The game is really bad at telling you how to get plot quests to appear. You get hand-held through the first set of plot quests; the first book, as the game calls it. But then, things just sort of happen. And eventually, you start coming up on quests from books three and four just because... enough time has passed? That would be my guess anyway. Eventually, I did figure out how to get the quests to appear, but it didn’t feel like a natural story progression. A few pro-tips in the plot quest department: First, conquering territory gets the quests from book two to appear. I’d suggest trying to take the Mercias (There are two, East Mercia and West Mercia), and any small kingdoms you may have left. Second, do not conquer Wales or the Saxons; they’re quest-important. Lastly, around turn 150, something really important happens, so get the quest “The Vision” finished up by then.

One last thing that really bugged me. There’s no way to tell what your income is until winter time, so you have to make absolutely sure that everything in your economy is squared away by then or else you might find yourself up a creek.

ለማገባደድ, despite the bugs, I would absolutely recommend King Arthur: A Roleplaying Wargame to anyone who’s into fantasy, Arthurian legend, grand strategy, or swords and sorcery type stories. It’s got a lot to like, and a lot of really neat ideas and aesthetics. I am probably totally going to keep playing it, at least to the regular campaign’s conclusion. Now, this being a game taking place in the early Middle Ages, there are instances of arranged marriages, with you deciding which maidens marry which knights. There is something to be said about how doing so improves the knights’ abilities, basically turning them into stat boosting objects, but this is justified somewhat in that the attributes that boost stats are personality traits, and it would make sense for a person to be influenced by a person they spend a lot of time with. What is perhaps more disturbing when one gets into fridge logic, is that these maidens can be bartered to certain groups on the map, such as rebels or mercenary groups. The game wants you to believe that you’re arranging marriages between the rebel leaders and your maidens, but because doing so makes use of the same interface as bartering artifacts or gold, it really presents the unfortunate implication that you may be selling these women into slavery. Is that what’s really going on? Prrrobably not, but once the whole “slavery” possibility occurred to me, it wouldn’t be shaken. Really, the sexism problems this game has are the same ones that plague any game that takes place in Medieval times, and the same ones that plagued Medieval times (the time period, not the restaurant). Although, it is weird that each of the female heroes have an ability that gives them a stat boost in return for being prohibited from riding horses... Yeah, I thought that was weird.

^(One of the Sihde, on the right, compared to a group of puny mortals on the left. Like, dang. Why haven’t those guys taken over Britannia on their own?)^

[ecotone99]

[MF]It's all fun and games

The thing I hate worst about hunting demons is the hours. It sure as hell ain’t nine to five. I’m not saying it’s always at midnight, but it is very rarely earlier. Definitely nothing good happens after midnight.

I've been waiting on this one for a few days. The Strauss family had given me the key to their house and rushed out in obvious relief on Tuesday. As I had requested, they had tidied up but not moved too many things. I had come in with my gear and set up in the garage. A military style cot, dried food, two changes of clothes, some basic toiletries, and my box.

Yeah my box.

It’s important.

Years ago, I carved my box from an oak beam salvaged from a burnt down church. I had salvaged several things from that old place after it burned. I had a lot more of the wood, of course. The firemen had let me in as soon as they had completely extinguished the flames. Some of the metal objects had been quite warm but I figured I owed the congregation my best efforts. They deserved it. I was still pawing through the wreckage when about fifty parishioners showed up with tools and trucks. The had food and drinks with them. Two of the men had gently but firmly removed me from the wreckage and sat me down on a tailgate with a cup of coffee and the best damn egg sandwich I had ever eaten.

That was the night my eyes had been opened and my calling made perfectly clear. The night a demon burned down my fucking church. Right before I killed the little hellspawn.

These days I don’t get surprised. Some of the tactics vary with the demons but mine was pretty set in stone. As one of my childhood heroes, Bruce Lee puts it, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” My kick is my box.

I realize it seems a little weird as a weapon. It’s not so much the weapon exactly as a trap and a coffin. The box is very important and the nature of its making is important and hugely complicated. But in the end it makes the work so much easier. You can do this job without one, I had killed my first demon without one, but the box makes it possible to do so without burning down the structure you currently occupy. Bonus.

I won’t bore you with all the Symbols carved into the box. They are important certainly but the importance is directly related to me. If you made a box it would be very similar to mine in many ways. I could use yours and you could use mine. Assuming, of course that you are also a thaumaturge blessed by heaven. A thaumaturge is what they used to call a wonder worker or miracle worker.

I’m not making this shit up. Lots of Catholic saints, godmen in India and various other chosen people around the globe have done this throughout history. I can do it but I have no freaking idea how it works. I am satisfied knowing that it does, and I can help people with it.

Now sitting in the Strauss’ garage over the past few days I have really caught up on my reading. Mostly on my phone but also on my tablet, I devour series and single novels voraciously. If I could just make a living doing this I would be set. I eat a healthy, if a Spartan diet. I have all day to read, exercise and nap. Most nights are quiet and when they aren’t I have the grim satisfaction of knocking another invader off the wall between us and hell.

Have you ever looked at your watch, then someone asks you what time it is and you have to look again to answer them? That is the feeling I get when some demon shenanigans are about to begin. Like I did something stupid and I will likely do it again. I guess because the evil of the demon has a range and the perimeter feels more like exposed stupidity than actual evil. Chagrin maybe, I don’t know.

I set down my tablet when I get that feeling. I flex my feet in my boots to make sure the are tightly fastened. Standing slowly, I check the function of my joints and do a quick little stretch. I don’t want to pull a muscle for crying out loud. Some of these whoresons can get kind of rough. I snagg the box from where it lays on my pack. Finally, I roll my neck out one more time and walk to the door into the house and open it.

As I step through I catch a whiff. Butt funk and honey, Eu d’ Demon, my least favorite smell. The Strausses had told me that the demon seemed to begin in the kitchen and then move through the living room on its way upstairs to the kids rooms. I quickly decide to meet it in the living room instead of the kitchen. Too much sharp shit and glass in there.

Moving quickly I set the box down on the spot I picked out when I first arrived. The lid opens silently and I get a whiff of the oil that I rub into the wood after each use. It’s a pleasant and wholesome smell that covers up the demon stink very well.

I move silently and crouch behind the couch. I control my breathing and begin focusing on one of the small thaumaturgical miracles I can do. It essentially freezes any hellspawn in place for a few vital moments. I’m not one hundred percent sure why this is but it has something to do with how our brain functions versus a demons. Our amygdala is the part of the brain that processes our emotional reactions. Our amygdala loves a surprise. We like scary movies, surprise birthday parties and unexpected events. Even those people who say they hate them enjoy them. Well at least their amygdala has a positive reaction, even if the secondary reactions are not good.

I can sense the demon enter the room. The malevolence is palpable. An oppressive wrongness that kicks the senses into fight or flight. It’s time to make my move. My thaumaturgy is ready and I jump up from behind the couch and scream,

“Peek-a-boo!”

The reaction is instantaneous. The ugly blue/green thing with a clown’s face goes rigid, stiff as a board. I dash in and grab it with both hands and throw it as hard as I can towards the box. I hear the satisfying clunk of it closing, signifying the thaumaturge has taken affect.

I have never had the phobia but I do understand why people fear clowns. Something that closely resembles a human face but is slightly wrong in its features and movement makes us horrified. Deep down we know that the smile is wrong and hiding something. Every demon I have ever killed had a clown’s face. Horrifying.

I'm already fixing in my mind the next piece of thaumaturgy and I spin around putting my back to the demon and placing my hands over my eyes. I began to count aloud.

“1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi, 4 Mississippi, …”

When I get to ten I spin around and speak to the closed box.

“Ready or not, here I come.”

The box sits there, the lid is closed. I walk to the box and lift it onto the coffee table. I sit down on the couch and stare at the box for a moment and then reach out with my fist. I tap on the lid, the old rhythm. Tap tap tatap tap, Shave and a Haircut...a short silence. Then from inside the box comes the answering taps. Tap tap, Two bits. Got the bastard.

Now comes the coup de grace. I focus nearly all my attention on my left hand. I make it a weapon of the light and good in this world. I focus the wrath of God in my hand so that it begins to glow. I hold that power ready.

My right hand reaches for the little handle on the side of my box. It is the crank for a music box. As I begin to turn, the tinny sound of the music box floats in the room. I mouth the words to the song as I slowly crank the handle:

“Round and round the mulberry bush...The monkey chased the weasel..”

I think of all the little children in the world who go to sleep at night with a tiny touch of fear. They don’t know if they are the monkey or the weasel. Do they pursue their goals like their monkey. Scampering and trying to catch the things and people in their life that make them happy. Or do they scamper along in terror and panic? Stressed by the world and it’s pressure and always fearful of failure.

“The monkey thought twas all in fun..”

I know. I know they are both. I can’t save them from their own thoughts and choices, but I can give them one less thing to fear.

“Pop!...”

The lid pops open and the demon springs up. It is hideous and ridiculous all at the same time. It slobbers and snots through its horrid clown face. It’s blue hair bounced in ridiculous shoots at the sides of its head. The hands, in fat white gloves, reached toward me.

I reach out my left hand and touch the sickly soft fabric of its costume.

“You’re it, motherfucker.” I say in a low growl.

With the combination of the touch and those magic words, the clown screams. It lays its head back and howls. The hands come up straight in the sky and the entire clown body slumps all at once back into the box. One more scream comes from the box but it trails off. Like the old Roadrunner cartoons when something fell off a cliff. The scream fades and dies. I look in the box just to be sure. It smells like unwashed ass and honey but otherwise it is empty.

My right hand is still on the crank handle, I play the last notes.

“...goes the weasel.”

More stories, and some good reading and podcasts at https://www.ityatale.com/stories

submitted by /u/RevMajor [link] [comments] via Blogger https://ift.tt/2KFQOye

[bluewatsons]

Ryan Britt, Harlan Ellison Still Has a Mouth, Thankfully Still Screaming, TOR.com (Apr. 25, 2013)

I was barely 20 and when I first met Harlan Ellison in the too brightly lit cafeteria of South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona. I had driven with a posse of fellow booksellers to see the infamous SF legend speak at the college, and after what can only be described as Ellison doing stand-up comedy, I made him sign my copy of Troublemakers, got my picture taken with him and then arrogantly told him to remember me. He responded, “Sure kid.”

And more than a decade later, I’m happy to report Harlan Ellison still calls me “kid,” and is just as charmingly outrageous as ever.

Last week, over the phone, Harlan and I discussed the recent re-release of his very first 1958 novel Web of the City, now being reissued by publisher Hard Case Crime. But truly, any discussion with Harlan Ellison won’t be limited to the boundaries of one subject. Most interviews I’ve conducted with authors are a kind of sound-byte piracy: I swoop in and scoop out from their brains exactly what I need to create the perfect piece.

But chatting with Harlan Ellison isn’t like that! It’s the most fun you’re going to have in an interview, but it’s not really an interview. It’s a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral. Sure, these bullets might be rubber, but you’re definitely not just going to get what you think you want. You’re going to have to earn it.

“You’re three days late!” Ellison growled after I introduced myself. This is unfortunately true, and possibly my fault. I decided to remind him that not only did we meet over ten years ago, but also that we spoke on the phone in 2011. That time I talked with Harlan Ellison he thankedme for an article I’d written on Tor.com about a short story of his called “How Interesting: A Tiny Man.”

Luckily he remembered this and said, “Well, I try to be punctilious in these matters,” and then laughed like a jolly gargoyle.

Web of the City, Ellison’s first novel, is in essence a snapshot of gang violence on the streets of New York City, capturing a time and circumstances—an entire universe—which doesn’t exist anymore. The novel concerns the machinations of Rusty as he attempts to leave a gang called the Cougars, who will surely kill him for this transgression. Ellison based much of the character of Rusty and the events of the book on his own experiences in being in a Brooklyn-based street gang at a young age. But just how much of the book is really Harlan Ellison? A lot!

“A lot of Rusty’s background parallels my background on the road as a kid, because I was off on my own very young, age 13. A lot of the scrambling and the shoe leather is autobiographical. The rest of it is just straight action adventure.”

But the New York City of Rusty is not the New York City of now. Having lived in New York City for almost a decade myself, I tried to figure out just how much of Harlan Ellison’s New York and the New York of Web of the City has changed. Ellison tells it like this:

“It’s a very different city now than it was then. And I haven’t been back since before 9/11. But that may be a lie…I remember my city, my New York very clearly. I can walk those streets, but all those people are gone and one by one all the places I went are gone.”

In the introduction to this new edition of Web of the City, Ellison writes of a possible legend about Ernest Hemingway intentionally destroying his first novel. From the introduction:

Yes, the story goes, Hemingway had written a book before The Sun Also Rises, and there he was aboard a ship, steaming either here or there; and he was at the rail, leaning over, thinking, and then he took the boxed manuscript of the book…and threw it into the ocean. Apparently on the theory that no one should ever read a writer’s first novel.

And yet, here we have a reissue of Harlan Ellison’s first novel! I demanded to know from Ellison if we younger writers should all be throwing our first novels into the ocean. As with most of the questions I presented him, his first response was a peal of laughter followed by an amused response:

“The question is an acerbic one…I read so little these days…things coming out are of so little interest to me…that I’m the last savant in the line to ask this question whether their work should be shitcanned.”

This part of the conversation segued into asking what Ellison watches on TV these days. “The test pattern,” he quipped, referring to the bars of color that appeared on CRT televisions, allowing you to adjust your set to its optimal settings. I assured him I was 31, and able to remember such things, but Ellison was nevertheless suspicious and fired back with, “31? I have software older than that!”

One of my favorite anecdotes about Harlan Ellison is the fact that he supposedly wrote his short story “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” completely in the nude and that he frequently wrote naked. So I wanted to know, what’s the deal with Harlan Ellison writing naked? He chuckled mischievously before saying this:

“Well it has been fairly recurrent. I wear whatever it is I’m wearing, when I get the urge to write, so if I get out of bed at two in the morning and wanna write I haven’t got the time or the patience to throw on pajamas…but in Vegas when I wrote that story, I did write it naked…God knows why. But that’s like asking ‘why did you put on shoes this morning.’ What is, is.”

Returning to the more serious matter of Web of the City’s relentless violence, I couldn’t help but feel a connection between these switchblade-wielding gang members and some of the other more malevolent forces in Ellison’s SF stories, specifically the sadistic computer from “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” In that story, humans are tortured endlessly by something they once programmed, but I wondered, are we as a species able to escape our cycle of violence? From street gangs of the past to killer artificial intelligence of the future, where does it end?

“We are a very strange species. On the one hand we have Picasso’s paintings, on the other we have the AK-47. And some people are literarily drawn to the physical art of weaponry. If you take a knife, a knife can carve meat, it can carve a whistle for a child, it can be used for sculpting, or it’s a murderimplement. A gun can’t do anything but kill!…I don’t know if we can ever escape this. I mean, we’re a fairly young species, but we don’t show a lot of promise.”

To this, I asked Ellison if it was possible that fiction like his own might shine a light in the darkness and maybe, just possibly, help make humanity more aware of the violence it commits. He laughed again before responding:

“You must have mistaken me somewhere for someone who has some knowledge! It is hard to go through life as I have, being a guy who thinks we’ve had a good chance at it and we should turn it over to the cockroaches…BUT every once and awhile there is a ray of light. Every once and while there is an actor, or an artist or a philosopher who says or does something that makes a tiny difference. And for me now, at an upstanding age, I’m no longer the buccaneer, I have to be a little more philosophical…I cannot give you an answer. I’m not that wise!”

While the author’s relative wisdom still up for debate, Harlan Ellison is at least famous enough to be considered on wider platforms. The week before our interview Harlan Ellison recorded a guest spot on The Simpsons.

“I finally made my appearance on The Simpsons. They’d written a Harlan Ellison part for Harlan Ellison. And apart from taking a tumble out of chair in the writers room…it was great fun. And everyone said ‘YOU’RE FAMOUS NOW!’”

But Ellison has always been famous to me and one of my favorite old-school stunts of his was the writing of new short stories in public. Whether in bookshop windows, on the floors of conventions, in art galleries or outside, Harlan Ellison used to frequently sit around and create stories in the interests of reminding people that writing is a real job and quite hard work. I asked him a little bit about his feelings of doing this public writing and what he felt like it meant to people.

“It’s a dog and pony trick…I work well under pressure and most people don’t. Most people look at writing not as a holy chore, but something beyond means. Most other people think it appears magically. A kid came up to me sitting in public [writing on a typewriter] at an art show…and he looked at me punching away on the typewriter and said to his mother ‘What is that thing?’ And she said ‘That’s a typewriter,’ but he couldn’t figure out what it was. So I said ‘It’s magic! I think into it and what I want comes out!’ And he screamed ‘Mommy, mommy, you gotta get me one!’”

This, to me, couldn’t be a greater representation of the dark magic that is Harlan Ellison; lying to a child about the magic of a typewriter, while somehow also telling the child the truth. Even though he might misdirect you with faux-pomposity or a seemingly cynical view of the failure of the human race, he’s actually a laughing chuckling wizard with more in common with Socrates than he lets on. Harlan Ellison’s work is there to make us talk about it and Harlan Ellison is here, maybe even unwittingly, as an example of those rare artists who occasionally make a difference.

Underneath all the humorous bluster, Harlan Ellison loves you, whether you like it or not. Because as I got off the phone with Harlan, the last thing he said to me was: “keep it up, kid.”