Twa Corbies makin' a mane.

Carousel

2009-01-16T04:34:28Z

I've just finished putting together the beginning of a project on the writing domain, Halflit. It's an open ended collaborative story-writing endeavor called Carousel, and anyone who's interested in participating can wander over there and register whenever.

[x posted to a variety of places]

Moving House.

2009-01-14T21:11:57Z

I'm moving my writing blog, at least for the most part, to here:

http://crows.halflit.net/sketchbook/

Also, the Halflit (http://www.halflit.net) domain is becoming active again. There are challenges in the members area and I will be launching an open project in the next few days (just as soon as I can find my TABLET PEN where the hell did it go arg...). If you're interested in looking into it and joining up, just shoot me an email - crows /at/ halflit.net.

Loves <3
M

The Chant of the Sibyl; True Life.

2008-11-02T18:04:16Z

“Ho there! What's that!” a voice nearer to him cried out in curious alarm, drawing the snap of his attention out of his swirling thoughts. He stopped and looked down the hill, watching the collective of his brethren bewilderedly drop their their skids and turn, raising their hands to mitigate the indistinct glare of the sky.
His senses honed to a sharp enough focus a few moments later to perceive the sound, and the black mass in the sky, at the same time. An ungainly flying shape angled its way through the petticoats of the cloudcover, which was low over the ground but so featureless that it offered little depth-perception to the eye. The staccato of its blades slicing the air to keep it aloft struck Caleb's ears unfettered by the haze that made its shape inconstant in the sky.
Caleb narrowed his eyes for a few moments at the helicopter as it moved inland and then burst into a run back down the slope away from the base. He paused on his way down, skidding to a stop that almost sent him tumbling to grab a bewildered compatriot's shoulder.

Caleb barely waited for the other man to nod, dimly aware that his name something to the effect of Preston or Tristan, and took off toward the rocky shore without looking back to see that his orders were followed. In the wash of grey seawater on the darker stones, a boat pushed off to head back to the carrier loaded with cells. Caleb shouted and waved his arms, plunging ankle and then knee and then thigh deep in the cold swells before someone stretched precariously over its edge and hauled him roughly on board. Sitting on the floor of the boat as it swelled with the breakers, just beginning to gather a little speed for its trip to offload, Caleb took a moment to catch his breath. The small handful of men on board looked down at Adrian's lietennant with veiled curiosity and perhaps a touch of wariness. He waited until the chill from his soaked clothing bit finally through to the bone, and then stood, shaking himself off.
“A helicopter flew overhead,” he said heavily, still short of breath. “Did you see it?” A glance around at his companions revealed their nodding faces, some excitement beginning to stir about their postures. “Good,” Caleb continued after. “I need to go ashore to tell the leader.”
Silence lapsed in again, like a wave. Caleb continued, feeling the tenacity of conviction bind up his shoulders, his neck, and push his head up higher. “I'm going to take a team ashore to follow it. We need to figure out where it's going, and hopefully where it came from, too. We have to know who has access to that kind of technology,” other than us, his mind continued silently. There were a few aircraft left on the carrier, but no fuel by which to fly them and nowhere Adrian felt safe flying them for sure.
Truth be told, Caleb didn't know that Adrian would want to follow the craft inland, whether or not he'd be willing to expend the care or risk to figure out who those other people were. More and more, Caleb discovered himself not caring. Adrian saw deeper things than most men would in their lifetimes, casting his bright-eyed gaze out across barriers that Caleb couldn't fathom. Sometimes, however, he failed to see his proximity to the immediate, mundane, and deadly present for how far his gaze reached into all those interminable depths. Caleb saw those needs, swelling in open-mouthed hunger around him; hungry for nourishment, for rest, for warmth. For companionship, stability, shelter, and hope for the world of today, rather than the indistinct universes of tomorrow. Turning himself against the rail of the little boat, Caleb turned his gaze up to the aircraft carrier that loomed closer to them on the waves, and set his jaw hard against a growing headache of exhaustion and dehydration.
Yes. It was time to tell Adrian that he would take a crew ashore for however long it took to find the helicopter or assure himself they wouldn't. Caleb knew some men would go with him regardless of Adrian's wishes. Either for easily manipulated enthusiasm – like Donovan Kurtz – or because their loyalty to the charismatic leader was beginning to flag, four years of stagnancy down the line. Caleb didn't like those men, whose vision began to fail them already. They were, however, useful tools when the right occasion presented itself. And this was the right occasion. His eyes narrowed in the hard light above the water.
A quarter hour's time later he stood in the door of Adrian's berth, from which Adrian had not emerged since his near-breakdown to Caleb about the girl the prior day. Adrian stood with his back to the door, waiting to speak, composing thoughts Caleb could not read out of the back of his skull. Caleb kept his hands clasped at his back, staring hard, trying not to make a single sound lest he put himself on the incorrect side of Adrian's sensitivities for the evening; this didn't need to be any more difficult than it was going to be to begin with.
“Yes?” Adrian's voice finally lilted toward him. Faintly, in the reflection of the porthole, Caleb could see the other man raise an eyebrow.
After a moment's pause trying to determine how to broach the subject, Caleb closed his eyes and spoke. “A helicopter flew over the compound, going inland. We need to follow it, see where they're going and hopefully where they've come from.”
Silence flowed in past him to fill the room, making the distance between himself and Adrian farther and heavier. Caleb opened his eyes, taking in Adrian's silhouette in the dim room, the faint reflection of his face in the glass. The dim facsimile of his countenance remained unreadable, staring hard through the porhole and out over the sea away from the shore.
Finally, Caleb could no longer withstand the weight of that quiet pressing down on his shoulders, the lapping of water o the outside of the boat growing slowly more audible as no other sound penetrated to distract him from it.
“Sir, I...”
Adrian's eyes shifted just so in the dim reflection, pinning him with their disconcerting gaze. “Take what you need and get out of my sight.”
“Sir?”
“Caleb, go.”
Adrian's spoke entirely without emotion, his voice as level as the still earth and as cold. Chilled, Caleb stood on as long as he could handle it and then turned stiffly to go.
Donovan was fortunately still awake, lying in his bunk staring at the ceiling.
“You, boy,” Caleb said cooly from the door of the baracks. Donovan sat up, blinking his way back to the present. “Are you really ready to prove yourself in this system?” Caleb had a difficult time keeping the bite of bitterness out of his voice, and saw it cast a shadow over Donovan's countenance briefly.
“Um, yes sir.”
“You're coming with me,” Caleb hesitated, recalling the conversation he'd had with Donovan ashore not an hour ago. “I realize you haven't had much opportunity to rest, but this is important, and I need someone there that I can trust.”
A half-truth, Caleb did know that he could trust Donovan, but he was yet unsure how much of that trust came from integrity and tenacity on the boy's part, and how much came from the subtle but firm understanding of who he could and could not control at the end of the day. Caleb and the boy shared a long, level gaze for a moment before Donovan nodded, deferrance visible in his features.
“Yes sir. I'm honored by the opportunity.”
“Very good. We'll be going back to shore as soon as I see what kind of equipment I can put together.”
“Um, sir?” Donovan fidgeted slightly, his expression uncertain.
“What is it?” Caleb replied more shortly than he intended, stalling in the doorway.
“What... what am I coming with you to do?”
Caleb leaned his head against the jamb of the door, the coldness of the metal on his brow pressing fingers of fleeting relief into his headache. “We're following a helicopter that flew over the compound, going inland.”
He could feel Donovan's excitement without opening his eyes. After a few moments, the boy spoke, eagerness thinly veiled.
“Oh. Alright. I'll be ready when you are.”
Nodding, Caleb stalked from the barack, his temper growing steadily blacker.

Witch frowned and let his hand fall away from her. Her dark eyes fell floorward and closed a moment later.
“What if he's still alive?”
“Still alive?”

The Chant of the Sibyl

2008-11-01T19:46:37Z

[And so it begins again. For NaNo this year, I'm writing more chunks of last year's story, and chunks of its sequel, called True Life. This is from the kickoff last night, between midnight and 3 AM; picking up where I left off before. Fragments. It is not spellchecked.]

Jadany sat on her knees, feeling her feet go numb against the cold concrete floor of the compound. The stone, the air, all felt warmer than Witch's gaze curiously down at her from where he sat across her, their knees only a hand's bredth apart in the half-darkened room. She breathed in once, laboured, and breathed out again.

“You don't have to,” his voice came, as if from beyond a great distance, the low rumble of thunder that might call one's attention to a stormy horizon.

“No,” Jadany breathed slowly out, letting her eyes fall finally shut to the heaviness that pressed them. “I do.”

Suddenly, Jada stood amongst grass that rose to her shoulder, flicking softly back and forth at the joy of an inconstant wind. She gasped the air, her lungs flooding with the pure elation of clean purity, the fleeting memories of many Autumns lost to her; crisp and dying away like apples fallen from the tree. Low thunder murmured in the distance, wavering on her consciousness. She didn't want to turn around and look, fear clutching lazily at her stomach.

Pressing her hands to her abdomen, she looked down to see a sweep of unfamiliar gingham cloth; a simple frock whose cotton did little to protect her skin from a gathering chill in the air. Electricity lanced her consciousness, making her skin prickle as the thunder announced itself again. It crawled in the distance to her back, stalking back and forth as she put off turning to face it, conscious of her presence, her hesitation. Conscious.

Jadany turned slowly, the blades of grass always licking at her bare arms, tickling the goosebumps raised by the pre-storm tension weighting the wind. Thunderheads came up out of the distance like proud fortresses, or the stern faces of generals that wait for the oncoming battle to finally reach the buttresses of all their carefully laid plans. Plans. Out of the dusk, which looked timid underneath the brow of those stormclouds, a single figure resolved itself out of the distance. On the pallete of gunmetal sky and terrain below dun and gold with wheat ready for harvest, a single splinter of paleness grew steadily more solid. Finally, it grew into the shape of a man whose gait and shoulders she could make out against the swaying grain. He walked toward her. The storm, despite all the sweeping energy that it seemed to carry, stayed behind him. His pace remained even, and at a distance that shouldn't have betrayed such detals to her, she was able to make out that his eyes were blue. Pale, calculating blue like the color of deep ice, under the sweep of his long hair the color of snow.

I know his name, Jadany thought to herself, suddenly without the nagging fear that the storm had thrown over her. I know his name... I know I remember it. She straightened in the grass, waving a hand to him. His eyes remained on her, but he didn't wave back. His name...

Lightening glittered in the clouds behind him, sparking from mass to mass and illuminating the roiling vapour but not yet flying groundward. A second on the heels of the light, thunder snapped demandingly, but the man did not hasten his pace towards her. A dream consciousness, or the notion of having scanned the unmemorable far horizon, reminded her that no shelter existed in this open, endless field of waiting grain. No farmhouse squatted along the furrows, no barn leaned to shadow lazy cattle fattening themselves in preparation for winter. The field stretched impossible behind her, and, in fact, in all directions out from where she stood. Even though she never took her eyes from the approaching man, she knew every inch of it, every mile that fell away from the point at which she stood. Suddenly, Jadany sensed an exhillerating understanding of being able tos ee in all directions at once. A sense of the endless bowl of sky, the black earth beneath her feet that waited for rain.

The tall man was only twenty paces from her now, and gaining. Now ten. Now five. She looked up at him as he drew near, his stern face chiseled in angles impossibly hard and fine. A diamond adamance hovered around his countenance, expression guarded but not unkind. He stopped only a breath's distance from her, reached for her hand. When her fingers met his, they were warm and strong, his skin tough.

“Stay with me,” he said only, without introducing himself to her, reminding her of the name she forgot. Jadany couldn't remember any names, now, even though it struck her to try.

She faltered, shaking her head slightly as her brow furrowed without understanding.

“Shh,” he admonished gently, holding her steady as his other hand settled weightlessly on her shoulder. “Just stay beside me. Walk with me, where I walk. And I will walk with you.”

“But I...” her voice came from some tiny place far away, as if through miles and miles of cotton batting strewn from ground to sky. “I can't remember your name... I'm so sorry...”

“You don't need to, where we are going.” He smiled a smile that was not alltogether pleasant, the grim consciousness of many horrors glowing faintly behind his expression.

“Where are we going?” Jadany asked innocently, blinking her wide, dark eyes.

“Wherever you will lead me, because I know now that you will lead me where I need to go.”

His voice was beginning to change at a rate almost too slow for her to perceive. Sudden distrust flooded her, cold and unkind. Falling back a step, Jadany jerked her hand away from his, feeling the return of the same anxiety that gripped her when she first heard the thunder. The man's pale countenance began to shift and darken, twisting into something else. Some otherness, and also something uncomfortably familiar.

“Jada...” he whispered; the man that was not the man walking across the plains. His eyes warmed, the blue beginning to go green as his hair darkened in splotches as if stained with ink. “Jada, I have never stopped searching for you. Not for one day. Not one day.”

A scream began to tickle its way up her throat, testing for the tempurature of the air like a swimmer would a river. She backed up a step. He came forward to pursue, maintaining their prior distance of separation. She stepped back again.

“Adrian, no...” this was not the name she'd been looking for, not the name of the man who had come to her. “You weren't looking for me... you didn't come for me...”

Tears welled unexpectedly free of her eyes, coursing hotly down her cheeks in an unwelcome torrent. A ragged sob broke her words and she stepped back again. Adrian pursued her.

“But I have, Jadany. Let me show you.” He opened his hands to her. His palms were black, small holes without detail that extended to an endless depth. “Let me show you! You wanted me to show you!”

“Stop it!” Jada cried out. His hands flew to her shoulders, gripping her tightly as she struggled away from him.

“You told me you wanted to be part of what I was building! Well I tell you here, I have built it! You are a part of it! Its mother, its firstborn. You are the womb from which I, too, will be reborn ... a son of this thing we have created. Together.”

“You're lying to me!” Panic made Jadany's voice high and thin, trembling on the lip of the threatening clouds above their heads. “I have done nothing! You couldn't have wanted this!”

“I want only what is true,” Adrian said with a black smile. “Be quiet.”

Jadany pried her mouth open under his stare to scream, shaking herself violently in his arms to try and free herself.

“Be still!”

Thunder roared above them, viciously throwing its head this way and that.

Jadany fought the reaching arms. The voice pushed again through her thoughts, through her closed eyelids.

“I told you you didn't have to do this!”

A bright light seared away the fields, the thunderheads, the reaching hands, the old voice echoing through her mind. Darkness followed, and stillness.

A hearbeat threaded its way finally to her consciousness; elevated with fear or exertion. Sensation resolved before sight, as if her eyes had gone into her skin because they didn't want to see into the world. Fingers pressed her hair, her cheek to skin, an arm around her waist. Finally, Jadany realized that she was pressing her eyes closed so hard they ached. Breathing deeply, she made herself open them and pulled away.

Witch's face was pressed in the hard lines of a frown, suspicion and concern mingling equally on his features. “You should not have done that.”

Jadany shook her head, barely able to shake out the trembling words, “You still don't understand, I didn't have a choice.”

He let her go reluctantly, allowing her to slide backward and sit on the floor, leaning heavily on one braced hand. “Choice... is never mine,” the words stumbled out, accompanied by a scrap of hollow laughter.

“But you saw something,” Witch only spoke after a long, calculating silence. Jadany could tell he hadn't wanted to say anything at first, lest he set her off again. He opened his mouth, let it close again, opened it, and then pressed his lips firmly, lowering his gaze to her trembling arms.

“I'll tell you,” Jada gasped exhaustedly, unable to catch her breath. “I'll tell you... just give me..”

The clatter of footsteps interrupted her, a loose gaggle of sounds bursting through an open door.

“Jada?” The emotion that crested high in the voice seemed incongruous with its identifying notes. This was Ivan, pouring through the door in the far end of the chamber. She didn't turn to look up at him as he descended upon her, followed closely by Isolde's smaller hands. “What's wrong? What happened?”

Sensory awareness began to ebb from her again, spinning the room into more distand and more distant spirals. She worked her mouth to speak, unable to gain full control of her musculature. Her tongue felt heavy and snakelike against her teeth, something very different from a human instrument of speech.

Snatches of words drifted her direction from the muted pandemonium. Ivan had turned his focus on Witch who sat on silently, Isolde pleaded with one of them; hands brushed at her shoulders, kinder than Adrian's had been in the dream, lowering her onto the cold floor for a moment.

“My god, she's cold as ice...” Isolde's voice drifted through the haze with some more clarity, very close and very warm to her left cheek.

Something here about a blanket, something there about getting her to bed. A command, from Ivan; “Pick her up.”

Jadany tried to open her eyes and failed, tried to open her mouth and failed, eventually resigning herself to simply let her head roll against the curve of a man's shoulder.

“Don't make me go back,” she finally managed, and only with a great and heaving exertion of the last of her strength. Don't make me go back to him.

Isolde and Ivan stood on one side of Jadany's cot. Witch stood on the other with his arms folded and his face stern.

“I didn't do this to her,” he said firmly. While Ivan thought he was just trying to absolve himself of guilt that, fairly, he didn't deserve to have pressed to him, Isolde sensed more delicately that he was trying to convince himself as well as the two doctors. The fear of a child, of an uncertain animal, shadowed just under his eyes. Reaching across the narrow cot, Isolde caught one of his hands as he shifted and gripped it tightly.

“I know,” she finally said firmly, leaning in to not release his fingers. “I know.”

Ivan looked between them unhappily.

“Jadany sometimes has... episodes,” Isolde continued, clearly unsure of where or how to explain the uncertain reaches of Jada's unique skillset. “I'm confident that she'll be fine. Usually, she just needs to rest for a while. She'll be alright.”

Witch said what Ivan was thinking, raising an argent brow. “Usually?”

All three pairs of eyes fell to Jadany's diminutive frame, prone on the cot they stood over, breathing shallowly. The blanket spread carefully over her body made it seem shapeless and impossibly fragile. Her dark hair flowed over the edge of the pillow, streaked her brow with shadow and made her look like some kind of siren hauled up from a depth that had clutched her too tightly to its bosom.

“I asked her to tell my fortune,” Witch said after a few seconds, frowning as he lowered his bulky body to a crouch and peered on a level with Jadany's closed eyes. “I didn't know...”

“You couldn't have,” this was Ivan, in a show of compassion that surprised Isolde somewhat. “There... isn't anyone else like her.” After four years, Ivan had become very confident of this. He didn't know whether Jadany was the way she was before the disaster, or if her 'talent' had only come after. Staring down at her unconscious face made him realize, with some guilt, that he'd never bothered to ask.

“I am not,” Witch said, lifting his eyes briefly to the pair before looking back down, his fingertips gingerly on the edge of the cot to maintain his balance.

“What do you mean?” replied Ivan, blinking.

“I am not, like her.”

“No... I mean, like I said... I've never met anyone that--”

“But I am not like you either.”

Ivan found himself pinned by Witch's icy scrutiny and fell silent. Isolde looked from one man to the other, filled with forboding. She reached for Ivan's arm, hooking her fingertips in the crook of his elbow.

“Why don't we let her get some rest. I'll peek in on her in an hour or so and see if she hasn't gotten a little bit of her color back.”

Recognizing the artificial cheeriness that Isolde used to cover fear dancing pleasantly in her voice, Ivan nodded and covered her hand with his other before clearing his throat and nodding a second time to Witch.

“She's right. Why don't we go back out to the mess and have a seat. Maybe they'll still have some tea hot.”

Without speaking further, the three departed the bunk area and walked stiff-legged out into the commons. From the corner of the room where Jada, Isolde, and a few others slept every night, the clutch of teenagers glanced furtively from a huddle of quiet voices.

Everybody's faces had gone different since earlier in the afternoon. Everyone had heard the helicopter, and people who didn't recognize it initially were swiftly told of what it was by those who did. The few that had followed them out and seen Ivan's conversation with Alexander Maze – though Ivan didn't know how much of the words that the quiet MDRA director had been heard – had told as much as they could to the others but the story was tangibly beginning to warp before their eyes as it raced around the compound in whispers.

Alex said he'd be in touch. That left Ivan nothing to do but wait and wonder what the man had in store. He wanted nothing more than to have a good reason to turn him down, but the simple, brutal facts of their situation that to do so would be certain death. He knew, without ever having to say it or consult Isolde's sometimes more rational mind, that there was no way he could refuse Alexander's offer in the good faith of the people who trusted him to lead them into as full and safe a life as possible under this new order.

This thought followed him in the eyes of the growing adolescents, and every other he met on the way from the bunks to the mess, a walk of some ten minutes at an inconsicuous pace. The occasional sidelong glance at Witch revealed a stern but empty face, unwilling to betray even the tiniest hint of intention or emotion about the man. They sat down at the same table they'd sat with Jadany at when the helicopter arrived hours before.

Isolde finally aired the other burning question.

“Did she tell you anything about what she saw?” her voice was more timid than usual. Witch shook his head.

“She was afraid, though.”

Silence settled down around them, making the room seem darker and smaller.

“Who was that man?” Witch's voice again stirred the pall, stubbornly resistant to the two doctors' mood about the situation.

“A scientist,” Ivan replied brusquely. Witch waited for followup that was not delivered; Isolde shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

“Earth beneath my feet,” Caleb breathed to himself after a long exhallation through his respirator. “Earth in my hands.” Adrian's brief mantra had started to lose eaning for him after the millions of times he'd said it. Nonetheless, though he forgot the initial lecture that those eight words had come with, it still carried some semblance of soothing. The earth so called beneath his feet crunched with the weight of his boots rocking across it as he descended the small slope to consult with some men struggling to negotiate a flat of powercells over the lip of a small ridge. Lending the strength of his back, Caleb stole furtive glances into the tired eyes that peered over and through the respirator masks. Effort strained the lines ther e – both men older than he – and sweat glistened beyind the protective lenses. They were all used to being worked to the bone, sometimes out of Adrian's radical moods but mostly out of necessity.

The skid lurched, threatening to spill a stack of cells that Caleb caught with a swift hand, and then finally slid back onto the path being dredge out by similar flats scraping back and forth from fortress to shore.

“This haul is amazing,.” Donovan's singularly emphatic voice startled him as he fell back from the skid he'd been pushing, letting the two men be on their way as the drug it along. Donovan was cataloguing and loading in the belly of the base, must have traded off with someone else and quite recently for the way his breath was fast in his mask, hands excitedly on his hips. Caleb smiled wearily, feeling a small stab of envy about how really only a few years of the boy's youth seemed to make such a difference in the boundlessness of his energy and, similarly, his devotion.

“Yes,” Caleb said after a second, trying to excuse his tardy response by looking hard over the crawling line of people taking things to and fro. “I'm sure Adrian will be very pleased. You're testing them, before they come up?”

“Yes! Yes of course,” Donovan rocked from heel to toe to heel again, grinning behind the insect-shape of his gas mask. “They're almost all good. The... I'm really startled, to tell you the truth, Caleb. After last night... I hardly knew what to think. I didn't think anything good could possibly come of that.” He pause for a second, and then shook his head. “I mean not that, I'm not saying I would trade Carl or anything, not even for--”

Caleb's hand on his arm stilled him, and the unseen grin that creased his eyes fell away into a frown below the black filter at his mouth.

“Sometimes, you have to, Donovan. You didn't make the trade, this time. It wasn't your choice. But always remember that someday it might be, and sometimes, you do have to.”

“Have to what?”

“Trade.”

The boy's shoulders slumped slightly, a similar weariness to the one Caleb felt dogged by finally breaking through his features. He felt guilty for disillusioning the boy, but more, he suspected that this was more truly how Donovan felt. If the wise were not immune to the nagging fear and uncertainty of the last years, the young certainly couldn't be either. Caleb squeezed the boy's shoulder, trying to be reassuring but doubting himself in the endeavor.

“I'm going to go back down there and see if they need my help.”

“Donovan...” Caleb let his hand fall to his side, feeling his fingers slacken in his gloves.

“Yes?” Donovan looked up, drawing himself straight and trying to school away the look of disappointment in his face, obscured though it was by the mask.

“Get some rest. Give yourself a break. I know you haven't slept for just as long as I haven't slept and it's killing me. It's ok. That's why everyone else is here now.”

“Yea, I know. But I mean, I'm not that tired, I'd rather help if I can. Either way, I told them I'd be right-”

Cutting him off again, Caleb tilted his head and then cast a pointed look back to the shore, where lay a cluster of smaller boats waiting chug heavily back to the aircraft carrier, loaded deep with powercells and whatever else they were able to scavenge.

“Go on. I'll go down there and tell them you're needed elsewhere.”

Hesitation registered clearly in Donovan's posture, keeping him where he was for a minute before he finally caved and broke away. “Ok, Caleb. I'll go back with the next boatful.”

“Good boy,” Caleb smiled to him, and turned to walk up the sweeping incline to the entrance of the base. Fortunately, a little more judicious scouting from the inside revealed still-working controlls for the ballistic gates on the sea-facing wall of the compound, allowing men and skids to get in and out without risking the same grisly end that met Carl Resher. Nobody really knew who'd gone ashore, and while Caleb had betrayed the news quietly to an unresponsive Adrian sitting with his back to the door of his berth, nobody else really knew. His body lay on the far side of the base, turning slowly paler as it prepared to succub to decay. Caleb didn't feel the need to take anyone on a field trip to pay final respects; Carl was no longer Carl, nothing but a badly mutilated corpse slowly leeching into the dirt.

Inside the walls, the air withheld the chill that morning had begun to lift as it burned slowly on toward midday. No direct sunlight beamed down, the sky instead filled with an indistinct grey glare as the never-displaced clouds swirled high overhead, an atmosphere scarred and milky by the afflections of the earth below. He fancied that the chill grew as he went closer into the center of the base itself, tracing his way down the antlike line of men huffing and straining to drag their skids back out to the lower ground and eventually the shore.

Imprudently lost to his own thoughts, Caleb failed to note the initial disturbance up the way behind him.

APv2.0: Nightmare salts

2008-09-18T01:56:21Z

The stairwell I raced down terminated in a slightly more expansive platform of raw concrete with an unkind looking metal door. Pushing my way out, I turned blindly onto the sidewalk and moved against traffic, away from the light of the apartment community and into the tangerine glow of the street lamps. My shoes slapped against the rain-glazed street, my only company, and my thoughts could not decipher any reason. I clutched the paper dampening in the cold sweat of my palm. I did not know where to go.

The more space I put between myself and the looming grey facade of the apartment complex I exited, the better I felt. Feeling better, however, should by no means be construed as feeling good about my situation... even far improved in state, my mind raced unrelentingly as I reeled to grasp what might have happened to me. When one has lost their memory, there is no reasoning out why one might have lost their memory. The night's chill began to get to me sooner than I anticipated, and the rustle of paper from the coat's breast pocket suggested to me that I ought to determine what I could inventory from my person and my clothing, as my surroundings had so far yielded nothing. Ducking beneath the shelter of an empty, darkened parking garage, I dug around in the pockets of my garments to see if I could find any clue or tool to assist in reclaiming my sanity.

One pen clipped around a fold of blank paper, wrapped around five uncreased 100 dollar bills. Approximately two inches of twine. One flimsy pocket knife no longer than my middle finger. Eighty-seven cents in assorted coins. Shoes, socks, jeans, underwear, a black tank top, a grey sweater, and the tawny-beige flight jacket I'd grabbed from the hook beside the door. No wallet, no jewelry, no personal identification, no watch. I walked, to my estimate, several more miles down the road before spending the rest of the night soaked to the bone underneath a bus shelter, wide awake and staring at the indistinct reflections of the city in the rain.

When the dawn light began to sharpen the buildings back into focus, I got up again, bedraggled I'm sure but a little drier than I'd been. The rain let up by mercy of a narrow cloud break that promised only a limited window before it would start coming down again, hard, from the darker front that moved swift in from the east horizon. The cold and stillness, the sheer impossibility of my situation, wore my mind down over the course of the night and I needed to sit somewhere and get warm in order to regain my capacity to think reasonably. The first diner I came upon opened their doors to let me in as their first customer, whereupon I reluctantly ordered a cheese omelet and a cup of coffee. As the heat soaked slowly into me, my mind wandered over a malaise of strange anxieties. What if I have food allergies? What if I see someone I know? Despite the nipping of such thoughts at my proverbial ankles, I could not displace the sensation that – because of some un-recalled menace – these were the least of my concerns of the present. I ate slowly, nursed my coffee, and kept to myself. A few other patrons came and went, and after initially flinching whenever anyone sat near me, I successfully calmed myself into something like relaxation and eventually claimed a newspaper left on an adjacent table.

I wanted to note the date, and look like I had something to do other than sit and stare into my coffee; a reason to linger, a way to at least partially shield my face from view.

“Military Conducting Unregulated Experiments on Humans”

A security leak allowed information about top secret drug development to reach the media. Following that, the most sordid facets of the recent discovery were quickly sensationalized in order to condition the facts for public consumption. The headline hummed ominously in the back of my mind, not letting my consciousness move on from it as I tried to parse out some sense of familiarity with the information I read on the page.

The fact of the military experimenting on the unnamed poor or incarcerated did not hold my attention so much as the allusions made to the nature of the substances being engineered. Psychotropes to play on the memory, to erase the memory of a man in full, or selectively with great precision coded into into chemical markers built into the cocktail. This 'latest generation' of truth serums could theoretically absorb and record memory-related signals in the brain before obliterating them. The government wanted a 'cut and paste' interface for the human psyche, and the spin already being set to the unbecoming news was the intention to provide a tool to reduce instances of human rights violations related to interrogation and imprisonment of criminals with information.

What rights does a man have to his own thoughts?

A clatter of dishes not far from me interrupted the early stages of philosophical reverie, and nearly caused me to jump out of my skin. With an unreasonable level of inexplicable anxiety, I looked up to see the waitress lifting more plates into a bus tub before heading my way with the coffee pot. Her eyes fell on the newspaper beneath my hand.

“Oh, I know, dear. Isn't that just awful? You'd think there'd be some decency among the privileged, but no, no... it's up to us, down here,” she paused to indicate her restaurant, her working-class status, her barely-getting-by, “to keep the world civilized.” Smiling at me, she filled my cup and shook her disdainful head at the newspaper as if to chastise the public icons implicated by the journalist. My fear ebbed into the uncomfortable sensation of being expected to identify with her. Perhaps, two days ago, I would have entirely... I couldn't tell.

“You sure you don't want any cream for that, dear? It does awful things to my poor stomach if I drink it black.”

“Yes, I'm sure. Thank you,” I said, before hesitating. Well trained sensitivity kept her eyes on me while she waited for the rest of what I had to say. “May I take this newspaper with me?”

“Of course, some one brought it to pass along, I suppose.”

“Thank you.”

She left and I sighed, folding the relevant pages in a careful attempt to order my thoughts as much as possible.

Amber Poe v 2.0

2008-09-17T10:07:05Z

[19 weeks? Really? It's not that there hasn't been work; just... haven't... posted anything. But I'm starting a sincere effort to get back to this story (I know, I know), starting with the thorough re-write it deserves.]

Amber Poe.

“For the third time, I don't know.”

My words echoed across the telephone line, crackling out of an emergency call center headset into the harried ears of an overworked woman who didn't believe me. Having received all the warnings about how it was illegal to impersonate an actual emergency call, I stood finally at this impasse with this stranger; how could she believe a story that I didn't have to tell, anyway? I felt the stoniness of my own silence bearing down on me. My knuckled whitened on the telephone. This is what 911 is for!

“Ma'am, are you in danger?”

“Not that I'm aware of. I don't know.”

“And you can't tell me your name. Is there someone who you can call to come get you?”

“I know nothing. I don't know where I am, I don't know... who I am. I don't have anybody.”

Those words, having to verbally express that you are unaware of your own identity, seem such a common thing to expel from one's self. No complicated vocabulary, no elaborate conceptual suspension of disbelief – and yet, my throat choked around them like fingers of muscle that refused, animally, to believe the statement true.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” she wasn't; her voice thumped on my ear in hollow insincerity, “but if you're not in a situation where you need emergency services I have to advise you to transport yourself to a hospital where you can get the proper care.”

I simply hung up, imagining the disembodied call-center voice relieved in the somewhere-building, passing my teeth-gritted desperation as a hoax before ringing through the next domestic violence call. My mind registered that emergency services was stretched to absolute maximum capacity; it became more and more difficult to blame her as the minutes went on, no matter how much I wanted to. I assessed my surroundings for the second time.

A tidy studio apartment with windows that met at the corner of the room circled me like a well-architected bubble of wood and glass. A narrow bed stood in one corner, made, and two empty glasses occupied a table next to the kitchenette in the company of a small vase of cut flowers. The flower smell mingled with the faint odor of tangy alcohol that filmed the glasses. As I shifted my weight, my hip pressed the edge of the simple desk on my left. I set my hand down next to the telephone and met a folded piece of paper I had not taken note of before.

Reluctantly, I opened it, unable to keep from wondering whose business I'd be disturbing.

'Take the back stairs out (take the left hall instead of the right one)'.

The letters capered hastily across the page, written by an unsteady hand just above a more cramped but equally panicky afterthought: 'don't forget your shoes and coat'.

My heart sped up suddenly, as if reacting to a thought that moved over and through me more quickly than my consciousness could catch. Crushing the note tightly into my palm, I strode for the door, and departed without bothering to tie the shoes the disembodied author had admonished me not to forget. I took the left hall, short of breath and barely able to keep from breaking into a run.

Scrub scrub

2008-05-06T02:17:26Z

Alright, commence editing on 'A Bottle Full Of Blood'. I'm to post it in sections as I get the changes typed in; part of the process, however, is finding a proper title. I'm considering 'The Bone-Paved Way' so far, but that's all that's come to me.

halflit.net

2008-04-27T17:30:53Z

Halflit.net

I've started a community for writers. It will include not only a community for fun, workshop, and support, but also hosting for people who are interested. I'm UNBELIEVABLY EXCITED.

Check it out, let me know if you're interested.

TercetTercet

2008-04-26T05:24:43Z

The weight of the glass in my hand.
The heat of the fire in my throat.
The ring in the sound of my voice.
The loose ground upon which we stand.
The hollow words of the old toast.
The feeling of losing a choice.

The hand that I grasp in the dark.
The desperate gasping for air.
The taste of the wine on your lips.
The searching in vain for a spark.
The lie that no one can compare.
The things I don't think I can fix.

The sad morning ache in my bones.
The dishes that wait in the sink.
The hesitant close of the day.
The message that you won't be home.
The wandering eye that I blink.
The telling myself you won't stray.

The more time we're spending apart.
The realizing that I can breathe.
The things that we once thought were true.
The still-dimming ache in my heart.
The old, broken things that I leave.
The things that remind me of you.

.

The Glassblower

2008-04-17T03:24:35Z

[Written originally in the Same_Oh! community. I'm very on-the-fence about the word 'until' in the third stanza. Keep it, ditch it? The line would otherwise stay the same.]

He lived next door to
Our apartment in the Projects.
His equipment was loud,
Studio of smoke and
Fire.

He caught dewdrops,
Shivering
In quiet midair. Every
One like a
Star.

Until we moved away,
Now the diamonds no
Longer sparkle, impressed
On empty
Space.

Forty-five now, among
My own children, magic
Still washes
My memory in the
Dark.

Hat

2008-04-12T02:31:53Z

It was grass-watering season. An army of thunderheads on the far horizon (the flat one) raised their unseasonable grey and white flags of warning nonetheless. Hattie lay on the sun-hot face of the big rock in Amie Gregor's front yard. The cold water of the sprinkler tickled her bare feet.

Amie wasn't home even though she said she would be, and Hattie was already bored of waiting outside of the empty, tiny house.

The clouds were marching closer and gathering slow menace. From their dark bellies, Hattie was beginning to hear the boiling thunder.

“Hat,” a voice – a man's voice, young and nervous – broke through the phalanx of advancing clouds. “Hey, Hat!” Urgency gathered in the syllables, and the lawn, the hissing sound of the sprinkler, the hot rock, the storm-lapis sky, all began to dissolve.

Hattie turned in the corroding fog of reverie to see Amos Rivera – a boy who went by Percy Blysshe Shelley in the group, where had arisen the custom of renaming members, usually after poets. Sometimes they called him Adonais for short. It was oddly fitting, she'd always thought, but she didn't know why.

“You OK Hat?” Amos was upon her now, giving a friendly grasp to the sleeve of her coat, a sad and canine expression of concern folding his brow above his brown eyes.

“Oh, uh, yeah...” Hattie hadn't realized that he was expecting some kind of human response out of her, though in retrospect that could have been construed as a little silly.

“Seriously, what's up? You don't exactly look well.” Amos said as Hattie linked arms with him and allowed him to lead her off toward the hotel plaza down the block where they were staying.

She liked Amos. He was new to the group – Hattie was not known for her quick interface with newcomers, usually identified amongst the arcane old blood that sometimes kept too much to themselves – but she got along with Amos. He was young, eager to please, and rich on inherited money. But he was very good He also seemed to have a genuinely soft heart.

“It's nothing. I just didn't realize that we were going to be here when they made the booking.”

“Didn't you? I heard you say you grew up in this town during the last meeting.”

“Yea, but...” Hattie began to explain. gesturing across the large lot that held the resort. “None of this used to be here. They put in that street for the hotel, that's why I didn't recognize the name.”

Hattie found herself looking back over her shoulder anxiously, toward the dilapidated little house on the corner. It was obviously a relic from an era past, nestled on it's tiny lot among larger, more modern apartments, a sad little ghost pleading Hattie's memory out of 20 years' hibernation.

She turned back to the hotel and the present to find Amos watching her with an expectant expression of concern. Instinctively, she smiled and shrugged, when something seemed to strike her nervous system with a sudden shutter. Hattie whipped back around to stare at the abandoned house -why hadn't they knocked it down to build there?

“First time I saw a dead body it was being pulled out of that house.” She said distantly. Amos blinked but didn't otherwise respond. They walked together back into the hotel.

A Bottle Full of Blood

2008-03-25T03:18:37Z

I'm linking to the site, here: I'm excited to have this story online, a lot of work went into it and a lot of work will further. This is the first of 9 segments, interlinked on the site.

A Bottle Full of Blood

Cardinal Rebuilt

2008-03-24T11:36:49Z

chaos.blackglass.org: Rebuilt, with all-new stuff posted on it. I'm filtering things in as I go... But I have a bulk of current projects put up there to have something more firm and more permanent than this notebook. It's long overdue.

[posted also to Incommune.]

Untitled

2008-03-12T15:35:03Z

Now here, here was a thing that made me want to return to the desert; to my desert. The Western Clathe Dunesea, that lays beyond a region of Clathir called the Mouth of Hell, West of the mountains, west of the great city Castiin which knows no rest for it has both a diurnal face and a nocturnal face to smile on the many different peoples that assemble there to trade. Bearing ever westward, ever into the inferno of the rising sun.

I am not a native of that hard, bright land. Sometimes, I wish I were... its scions are a brave and powerful people, a bloodline I would be proud to claim my own. Where I was born bears little consequence; I have not returned to that place for decades and do not care to.

(So many questions -.-)

Drifter

2008-03-05T14:40:02Z

[Second chunk, BY THE WAY there's a fair bit of swearing in this one. I might make mention that the whole Skin Game story contains some adult themes, though I haven't gotten into writing a lot about them yet. I'm not very good at keeping a general appraisal of that but, on a general basis, the audience I consider when I'm writing things unless I'm specifically writing for something else is an audience of adults.]

“Why do you do this to yourself?” Banen’s voice shook beneath his mask of purity, his mask of neutral quiet. She felt it in her flesh, felt it as his breast trembled, the air pushed forth from the exhalation of the words unsteady. He was angry. He was hurt. Aishling relished it, as much as she was able.

She pulled back further into her corner, flashing a palm outward, those white fingers splayed against the rain as it tore down her skin, which was painfully sensitive as a result of the chemicals in her system. Her other arm snaked around her folded legs, binding her body together as tightly as she could, save for the extended appendage. She wanted to ball all those errant limbs up into her chest cavity, bury them under her racing heart. Banen moved in the dark, circling to her other side, and then back to where he had been; pacing.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” That time was quieter… it hadn’t been meant for her to hear. She wouldn’t have, but there was blood in her ears and Heavenstep racing thick and dark in her veins to heighten every sensation into painful clarity. His voice was unsteady.

She choked, even the smallest motions of speech breaking her into another fit of uncontrollable trembling. “I need it. You don’t understand.”

Banen stopped in front of her; she didn’t look up at him. The light from the street lamp down the way from them was too painful for her eyes. She pressed her face against her clenched knees, scraping her shut eyes against the coarse fabric of her trousers and withdrawing her hand.

“For what?” She’d expected him to raise his voice. Banen usually did, after one of those abrupt halts in his pacing. This was a break in his pattern, the quiet way he spoke the stony words.

“To fight.” She managed to reply. That was, for the most part, a lie. They both knew so; he let it pass. Another silence stretched down between them, slack and unhappy. Taming her shakes for another few moments, she squinted up at him, cringing. “It… puts the world away.” He’d been looking away from her, but now, he looked back. She could see the blackness of his eyes under the unsteady darkness of his hair. A strange expression burned there, raw and unfamiliar; it raised her hackles. “Even for a little while… It shuts out everything else, and it makes me… ready, to do what I do.”

That much was true. Banen had seen it more than once, now… the first few encounters unaware. The first time, the angel had not understood the abrupt, absurd strength and constitution that his mortal compatriot had demonstrated in battle. Only later had he realized that her ‘performance’ in such tight situations was enhanced, significantly, by her drug of choice.

“… and that is everything.” She was continuing, shaking violently again. He was surprised her bones didn’t rattle beneath her very flesh.

Ash felt tears streaming down her cheeks. It felt like they were boiling, and the salt within them seered the small scrapes on her face. “I keep shooting because… I’d prefer, really, to not feel like this all the time.” Choking on the mirthless laughter that so wanted to follow, she cringed against the wall she was sitting against, her hands wringing one another viciously, twined before her coiled legs.

It was more vital to her than the air. It was the sustenance, and all else was accessory. She’d done enough, by that late in her life, that the symptoms of withdrawal might indeed never leave her.

“I just want a little happiness. I think I deserve that. I’ve been through a lot of shit. I’ve worked my fucking ass off, for every thing I have. Everything I’ve achieved, every god damn minute I’m even fucking alive.” Words were coming in a torrent now, her cold lips framing them uncertainly. “And I don’t think it’s anyone’s god damn business what fucking makes me happy. Least of all yours.” The later statement was laced with venom and punctuated by a ragged sob.

In the blurry web of her vision, Banen’s figure broke from it’s former, sullen posture, descending on her like a storm. Before her stunted reflexes had time to properly react, to escape, to fend him off, he was upon her. The blow she expected, the blow she braced for with all her strength did not come, however. Ash was enveloped in the dusky sent of sweat and sweet cigarette smoke as his arms encircled her body. She felt insubstantial, suddenly. She was almost as tall as Bane, but thin where he was musclebound; a whip where he was like a mace. And there, trembling in his heavy arms, she felt like he could crush her and she would shatter into so much dust.

“Why does it make you happy, Anya?” He was calmer, now, inexplicably… his cool voice washed over her like clouds or drifts of snow, moving through and around the haze of pain that surrounded her mind. For it, she was compelled to speak.

Bite of God

2008-03-05T14:37:11Z

[I started this story years ago, and have worked on it off and on since then. The last stint was quite a while back, but I've pulled it off the brick that houses all the stuff that's been dumped off of two dead computers now. I've always liked the characters in it - though I may end up renaming half of them (Bane and Morningstar, particularly; we'll see). This is the first go-through (in chunks) of stuff that needs more substantial re-writing than I've had a chance to give it, but I've at least cleaned up most of the really messy stuff from my teenage years. Oh man.]

Aurrin locked eyes with Banen, his gaze reluctant as he met hers from across the pandemonium of the hall. She still stood framed by the door, having just entered, slightly late, filled with silent terror and fury. Unheeding of Morningstar's meandering crowd of peon's and couriers, she cut through the loose crowd of people directly toward him. Bane stiffened, evading the brush of her shoulder as she settled into the place at his side. The aura of entitlement that she carried around her form made Banen bristle; she was determined that they would take this mission together, and that it would would help to clear the obstacles they’d happened upon as lovers. Aurrin and Banen had met working together, and it was too that element she wished to be returned.

Morningstar’s hard voice rang out across the hall from his small podium to their left. Without ado of any kind, the old man started announcing the working pairs that would be assigned to each of the dozen-odd missions and projects that had been posted in the mess of the complex for almost a week. It was at this same moment that Aurrin spied the sallow redhead, Aishling, who’d recently been initiated into the company as what she called a hired thug. Banen called her Anya. Suppressing a sneer at the stoic, green-eyed visage, Aurrin straightened to attend their commander.

The visceral reaction came before the rational decoding of what the boss had said. Aurrin whirled on Banen, a gauntletted fist raised to strike him. Morningstar had listed the missions; Banen’s name and number on the last one, slated to pursue the infamous Baronir Calthan. Banen was worth the mission… he was the best pursuant they possessed, but Morningstar had announced that his partner would be the newcomer, the mortal woman fresh among their ranks. It was impossible. Banen's eyes were on her, unflinching and unapologetic. It only served to feed her rage.

“No!” She pushed forward rather violently, fighting the encroaching crowd toward the podium. Unalarmed, Morningstar turned eyes silvered with age her direction, and one thinning white eyebrow arched. Furious, she met his gaze levelly. “She’s a novice, commander Morningstar. Unfamiliar with protocol, inexperienced in her work. You should be putting someone with equal skill to Banen on a mission of this depth, unless you plan to use her for cano –“

Simultaneously, Morningstar answered, “Protocol is of no importance in Calthan’s case.” And the young slayer interjected “I’ve got more on my record than you do, Khadran.” Their combined voices formed a knot of cold baritone and steely malice, both statements painfully clear to Aurrin.

Morningstar raised a halting hand to the woman at the derogatory term for his kind, and continued more calmly to Aurrin. “Are you suggesting that you, yourself, take on this mission, even given your personal politics with my agent?”

She flushed at his judgment, stringent on the air between them. “No sir, I suppose not.” Aurrin replied hotly, and whirled to depart. She was no longer needed.

Banen caught her, his hand nearly bruising against the bare skin of her upper arm. Startled, she glared upward to his face, sapphire eyes meeting indigo. “Aurrin-“

“What do you want?” She cut him off, uncaring that she was making a scene.

“I chose Anya… I can explain to you later…”

Irritated further by his false display of patience and the fact that he was acting like she didn't know how the alliance had been made, Aurrin ripped away, her flesh burning where he had touched her. As she stormed from the room without a glance back, bits of silky down hovered in her wake.

By the time midnight came around on the clock, Aurrin felt clean again. She had scalded her skin, scrubbing it to a stiff polish in an effort to erase the memory of his fingerprints.

He had come and gone. They had parted in a passion of harsh words, a bed of molten anger. He’d tarried at the exit, to turn and spit upon her doorstep before vanishing into the hovering dusk.

Persephone.

2008-03-02T04:19:47Z

The bars of the gilded birdcage were so thin as to feel impossibly fragile against the press of her fingers. The lone inhabitant, a tiny finch of exotic and unfamiliar plumage, eyed her warily from its perch.

Across the room from her, he pretended to tend his orchids, his fingertips tracing down the deceptively strong stalk of one of the flowers as he watched her sidelong. Shying away from his furtive glance, and having been caught looking herself, she glanced down to find her own fingers were still detectably flushed from the lingering heat of passion. Still able to feel the weight of his eyes on her body, she drew the loose folds of her dressing gown more tightly around herself, tucking a smile she was unable to repress into the shelter of her shoulder.

A second later he was beside her, sliding his warm hands around her hips to undo her grip on the material.

“Stop.” his voice pressed against her throat, an insistent purr just above a whisper. “Why do you always hide from me?”

Turning into his arms as the robe fell open so she could press her naked breast against his skin , she caught the line made by his clavicle between her teeth for a second, grinning against the inside of his shoulder.

“Because it always feels like the first time, with you, and I'm never sure what you think of me.”

Athlacarta: The Second Letter:

2008-02-02T16:58:47Z

Dear Adler,

I have a dream, often, that always ends here: the five-fingered shape of a black-gloved hand hardens out of the dark, stamping the wall so close to my face that I feel the scant brush of ballistic fiber against my cheek. He pushes off the wall, propelling himself down the corridor in apparent ignorance of me. He is so close I can smell him, even today, sweating cold as I write you this thing in assured peace and safety. He smells of life, of excited sweat, mingled with more artificial traces of singed firing residue and pleasant aftershave. He is human, just like you, or I, or any of the rest of these men who have come to destroy what I have known my whole life as constant. He is human.

I wonder, less often than I used to, if this wasn't the critical juncture... if I had stayed in my bedroom like an obedient station-brat, would I have been able to have seen them as soulless, as demons? If I had been able to see them as demons, (and, subsequently, not come to contemplate all those deeper evils, which come not by nature but by choice), would I have lived to tell you this story?

Alive or dead, the Prince's men remain like ghosts in my thought, in every dream that I wake remembering. I can imagine them, with such a flawlessness of recollection the likes of which I can't even apply to any given night's morning. There are their solid shapes in the spacious blackness, as happy blind and weightless as they would have been on land in pleasant weather. The rest of us were totally lost... experienced only with the occasional drill of session in a simulator, our limbs were useless in zero gravity.

The night was beginning to become populated with sound at that point, people in the rooms around me waking without fathoming the fate we were already sealed to. I could hear voices occasionally, muffled through the honey-comb of walls that extended around me in every direction; every one confused and bewildered, most becoming frightened, but not like they would be.

You were not a citizen of Athlacarta. I think I know that now... It makes sense that you would have come from further out, from a life hard enough that at least some of our catastrophe must seem so pedestrian.

I got out. Clumsy and disoriented as I was, fear drove me from my cocoon... nobody learns to live with the feeling of being caged, waiting for the coming slaughter. I don't think I knew, at the time, what was coming... I can say I'm sure I didn't have any concrete evidence. It's difficult to sort that all out now because the memory of what was before is so steeped in the memory of what came after. I definitely got out, though, into the darkened hallway. The body is a prison when you have no senses... no light, no sound, no weight on your bones to offer bearing to the mind...

In the support circles I've been shuffled through, people are all full of sensations. They hear the missiles fired to disable the gravitational and electric fields that kept the station in order. They hear the perfect rhythm of the Prince's many footsteps, feel the chilly mass of his company spreading out through the station like a quick moving and deadly virus.

There was nothing of the kind. They were invisible, like a dream that someone else is dreaming while I can only, powerlessly, watch them sleep.

Slowly, the sounds of faceless voices from behind the closed doors began to be somewhat more audible, their words still muffled and unintelligible for the soundproofing that cushions the hallway.

I was there, too, with my body pressed into a notch in the wall barely big enough to accommodate me. I don't know how to describe what happened next... the climate of the passage changed, so subtly that no language I've learned could adequately express it. There was a fluctuation in temperature, there was a shift in the silent air, there was a shadow cast by light too dim to register on my perception. I think we are more perceptive than we even realize, or utilize... and I think it is all these things that teaches us to know when we are not alone in a room.

With horror, I came to understand without question that there were other bodies in the hall, flowing soundlessly in a river of black-clad limbs that rendered them unreal in the dark. There is, I am convinced, deep genetic memories of an experience like this, where from dreams in which the dreamer is unable to scream, to utter any sound at all, are born. I counted, against my will, first twos then fours, so sure I would be seen that my heart scarcely dared to beat within my breast.

I was not, I fear to admit, canny enough to have been deliberately hiding at that moment. Rather, I'd gotten from the confines of my room to the relatively larger space of the passage and panicked. Paralysis had me in full rigor, I could no more think than I could move, all before my near-brush with this faceless enemy. The miracle, here, was not that he didn't detect my presence but that I didn't suffocate by the sheer force of my own will conspiring against me.

That is one of the worst feelings I can remember, knowing that my luck wouldn't hold out, that there was no true avenue of escape over the false and fleeting securities of my mind. It is one of the worst, though there have been worse since then.

Sincerely yours,
Cass.

Athlacarta: The First Letter

2008-02-02T16:56:56Z

Dear Adler,

I know we are still human. After all these many generations of vagrancy, when so many of us spend much or all of our lives without setting foot on the soil of any world at all, that does not change what is fundamentally within us. A few hundred years of relative freedom is barely a drop in the evolutionary bucket compared to the millennia we spent earthbound. The human organism is programmed to understand that the world will end under some kind of deafening holocaust of fire. It is the wrath of God, or man's fatal mistake sundering the sky with gouts of nuclear madness. It is the explosion of the sun, the implosion of the earth itself.

That's not how it happened.

The first shots were fired in the night, in silence... during the hours when the station lived in the shadow of the great and lifeless stone sphere it orbited. Since I left you, I have attended countless functions that claim to be support groups for survivors, where the story is told, and always begins with the sound. Every one of these people is lying. Nobody who lives today heard the first of the explosions, and on this fact I would swear my life.

I cannot fathom why, after these years, but I feel it should be you who knows the truth. Back then, you didn't give me a choice. It is for this reason that I do not offer one to you now. If you have read this far, you will read further. This much I remember.

So... the station passed into shadow and we, obedient to the programming of our humanity, went to sleep. I listened to that vast network of machinery shutting down around me. I grew up there. It was the lullaby of my childhood, and it was fitting that night would be the last I would hear it. Inch by inch she closed down. Power was diverted into patterns of nightly hibernation and silence, because the community bunkers were so far away from any part of the station that would have been staffed during the night. As it had during any of the other thousands of evenings of my young life – I was only thirteen, at that time, after all - silence, total and pure, granted me sleep.

I woke later to the chill and nauseating vertigo of my blankets and my equilibrium being stolen from me. In that early consciousness, I could think of nothing but that it was still silent... that much was right. There was no alarm, no emergency lightening glowing some eerie warning in my bedchamber. We had drills, in my youngest years, to prepare us if there was ever an error in the station's gravitational synthesis. But the event had never occurred genuinely. Not during my lifetime, and not in the station's history.

I lay there for a long time in that black maw of silence and vertigo until I eventually bumped into the wall of my bedroom and instinctively grabbed hold of a cubby fixed into the wall. The station was still silent... everything sounded so right, even as every cell in my body began to scream out that something was terribly, terribly wrong. correspondence

I clawed my way to the door and listened. That is how I can tell you here and now that no one heard those shots, no one woke to some uncanny understanding. They all came out of sleep just like I did... confused and tied into slow terror, with no brave ideas of what was to come. We – every one of us on Athlacarta – were infants, born blind into a world we had no concept of, unable to so much as exert a finger's worth of control on our surroundings.

Do not think that you would tell me, as I have been told before, that I will be able to find some closure, talking to other people who were there, or other people who know what I've been through. I haven't met an honest man among them yet, and I don't need their pity.

Sincerely yours,
Cass.

Quickie

2008-01-07T11:17:42Z

[An image that intrigued me. There's no more than this to it yet, in my mind or anywhere else!]

Kirsa lifted her head into the thin, winter air and stood still to listen over the wide expanse of snow and low brush, brittle with the season's leafless hibernation. One breath, and then a second, unfolded in silvery plumes around her face as she focussed waiting for a seam to come in the perfect silence. It rolled over the ice-fettered moorland in the cold, clear bay of a single hunting horn, bell-like with the voice that only Arlon's instrument could produce.
She smiled to herself, indulging in the sudden closeness of the memory of warm meat, the rangy company of the dogs in the keep, wine, Arlon's hand at her shoulder and his friends piling in in pairs from the long campaign. Letting that private smile warm her cheeks a moment, she straightened to hear the snow muffled hoof beats that signaled the retainers that had gone before him, un-announced. Shaking a little stiffness from her body, she broke from her place and finally crested the hill she'd come up to listen for him, but a mark on the canvas of snow stopped her in her tracks before she cantered down the gentle slope on the other side.
It was a wide arc of black-red, edges alternating between knife-like and indistinct on the whiteness. The two retainers, each riding one of the pair of swifter greys that moved ghostly in their stable full of robust war-horses the color of coal and coffee, were pulling up around the stain, a dozen or so yards from where she came on foot. In the center of the ichor lay a man, his eyes and mouth both open – blind and silent – toward the sky, his arms splayed carelessly away from his body, and a long gash crossing his arched chest.
One of the two men dropped from his saddle and, looking up, pronounced the stranger certainly dead. There was a long moment of the other man not knowing quite what to do until Kirsa joined them and flung her hand back toward the manor which wasn't far from where they were.
“Take him inside so we can at least afford him the hospitality of a proper burial. It may be the only chance we have to ward away whatever did this to him.”
The warm anticipation of her husband's return was crippled by the chill that man's dead face put in her. It had been, she thought, too quiet when she'd gone out that morning to wait for him. Ever since Arlon was a boy, he'd taken time and pleasure to teach her how to listen for the beasts of all seasons; how to know their voices and movements, even in darkness or the uncanny invisibility of a wild animal. This morning, there had been none.
Furthermore, there were neither tracks nor a trail of withered blood-spatter leading to the fallen man. Arlon's retainers exchanged a look before taking his ankles and feet to drag him back toward their keep.

Bramble

2008-01-03T11:26:16Z

Can I?
Read the searing word out of your head
Plucked as if, as easily, from
The pages of a book... held
In lives lead in neat, parallel safety.

Before, we were crossed
Wires, the accidental connection
The break, in a telephone line
That shatters out a few words
Breaking open the heat of
Someone else's secret;
Peaking into the interior of the Earth.

Is it like this because:
There are things in this world,
You cannot un-know?
A print made on my mind's dark eye.
Burn a gaze on my retinas.
Ghost shape of the voice,
Retreating laughter,
Sympathy-ache:
My throat closes, too,
Around a tangled wish.

My heart is a bramble,
Wild as sunlit summer,
As dappled black with shadow.

Villanelle: The Nautilus

2007-12-16T20:17:30Z

From the first house, ghosts have set me free.
In one great gesture, I am brought to bear.
Do I sail by moon or more by sea?

Here, I search an echoed, ancient history
In mirror, tomb, and endless spiral stair,
Where from the second house I am set free.

Face of muse, or maid, or mother disagree
What task a resolution, what throne's heir:
Do I sail by moon or more by sea?

Here in fathoms, dirge, and jubilee
I've searched the face of life for every care
From the third house, ghosts have set me free.

A year for motion; another, memory.
Inertia guides me onward, and I dare:
To sail beneath the moon, beneath the sea.

Reforged by fire, volcanic gravity
Reborn by stony fountain, echoed prayer.
From the last house, ghosts have set me free
To sail or swim by moon, by frozen sea.

By Lock and Key - Unfinished, draft zero

2007-12-13T10:37:29Z

I walk these paths until
They come familiar,
Nothing but veins to my feet.
The names of my companions
Do not matter.

Whether it is you, or it is you
Time will be no different, and
In time the sand forgets
It does not name the footprints.

In my silent life,
That quells my soul in secret
I am at peace with
This: that how I want to understand
Is cheek to cheek, is
Mouth to mouth.

[When I am with you, I pretend to be content with my life. When I am alone, I pretend to be content with myself.]

Recently.

2007-12-07T23:09:42Z

Recently, I have lost myself. I sit at the window with the pen, in the posture of the old days, and tap my lips beneath my furrowed brow, in every posture of interminable depth. But, behind the glass, I find myself inturned to search, only, my own thoughtlessness. I opened up my stomach to the void, and my voice echos eviscerated and empty. Every day, this week, I have woken with the thought determined in my mind to find a path back to the way I used to be. It is not, as it should be, like desperation... more, it is a settled and domestic impulse, not unlike rivetting myself to the task of fixing the loose plank of the deck or taking my old clothes to the charity dump bins. I tell myself, I tell myself all the time, that I just have to crawl down on my knees and get my hands dirty.

Finding one's soul is not like weeding a garden.

>

2007-12-06T01:03:27Z

Because you are always a soldier
And a soldier always plays
By the rules.