Nightland

The words of the god seemed hollow now, ringing in the depths of the crypt. Light crept in from gaps in the masonry and refracted, as it were, off the crystal studded walls that entombed the living soul there, providing them with only vague outlines to go by. A mummified body lay stately on a slab, mouldering.

Marlan felt cold, freezing, as the surrounding stone sucked the heat from the air, filling their bones with ice. They could not remember much, just the god-things words, the tomb’s sparkling walls, and the nightland. It had been too long. Whenever the light faded and left Marlan in darkness it was as if they left the crypt as well, travelling on the god’s words beyond it to a nightland hidden by the faint rays. But as soon as the light returned Marlan did, to squat here alone, but for the corpse.

Sometimes they felt the urge to move, to find out what else might be found between the crypt’s walls. They never did. Instead, Marlan stayed still, waiting for the darkness to come over them again and send them away to their nightland.

That time was coming now, and Marlan made the only movement they ever did. The last of the light bounced off their pure white teeth; the smile was a shark’s nightmare.

Chairs

Chairs made of wood stand alone amongst the trees and call to their past. Meeting these past incarnations of themselves is a revelatory experience, an event that twists and turns the mildewed minds of these carved creatures into new shapes. Maybe, just maybe they could become something new again. Perhaps they can sprout again.

Flanigan

Flanigan watched from the bridge as the ducks settle onto the pond, returning from their migration south. The water was still cold, the ice having just broken up and melted, and it kept the body on its surface below ever so slightly fresher.

Flanigan had been here a few hours, waiting for the police to finally arrive and arrest him. The day was getting on and the sun setting behind the hills in front of him, its red glint radiating a semi-circle of fire on the mirror of the water. He could hear sirens in the distance.

Flanigan stretched his arm out over the water and dropped a phone from his hand down to splash into that semi-circle, fracturing it into rippling shards of red light. The body started to bob up and down, up and down again. Flanigan’s hands felt sweaty and he rubbed them against the wooden balustrade only to leave a faint smear of blood behind, a trail that followed the grain of the wood until it met the banisters supports.

He heard the cars pull up behind him and the sound of their doors slowly opening.

“Hands on your head now sir.” The voice was firm on the surface, if carrying an undercurrent of uncertainty, and Flanigan followed its instructions to the letter. He heard footsteps on the wooden slats behind him then a hand pressing down hard on his left shoulder. He sank to his knees. Cuffs clicked around both his wrists and he was yanked to his feet and pulled towards the waiting maw of the police cruiser.

Flanigan saw the dark insides of the car grow closer, and waited for the inevitable.

Donkey

The path was so well sodden with rainwater that it ran almost like a muddy river. Struggling through the flow was a donkey, head drooping towards the ground, and, on their back, they carried a single human figure whose face was obscured by a hood pulled tight against their head. The wind screamed between the fence posts that jutted out at the path’s edge. The wind and the suck of mud on the donkey’s hooves were the only sounds that could be heard.

A drop of rain fell from the sky to land *splat!* right on the top of the rider’s hood. It ran down the left side of the hood, a rivulet of rainwater running stop-start down the coarse fabric, and followed the curve of the rider’s ear around in a semi-circle before dropping down onto the side of the donkey’s bloated stomach. The moon’s light shone in the water’s reflection.

A faint, man-made, light shone in the middle distance in front of them, outlining the shape of a three-storey, rickety looking building a couple few metres along the path. A sign hung haphazardly out from the building’s face, with flaky paint proclaiming the place to be ‘The Last Clam’, or maybe ‘The Last Calm’. The donkey came to a stop in front of the door, nuzzling a little against a familiar post that jutted diagonally from the muddy ground.

 The hooded form slid down from the donkey’s back to sink into the mud before the doorstep. They stood their awhile, letting the cold mud soak through their boots and into their soles, before stepping onto the first step and reaching out a gloved hand to push open the door.

Inside the flickering lantern light accentuated insanity. Blood ran rampant along the roofbeams, trails trickling with purpose, weaving between the arches that support the roof above. The barkeep, his ragged face half-hanging from his skull, was squeezing whiskey from his lungs and into a shot glass. His waiting customer, a woman whose baby was tied to her by an umbilical cord running into the rotting placenta still lodged in her caesareaned stomach, stood patiently. A dog ate a liver off the floor.

The traveller stood in the doorway a little while, watching the scene as the firelight spilled out into the waterlogged yard behind him. The donkey gazed in, curious. The traveller took a deep breath before stepping through the door, it was going to be a long night.

Hey

 Well piss and vinegar look at the time, lets spend our time writing some lines! Will they be good? Who can say! Lets found out when we read them today!

Wilderbeast

Where do the wilderbeast roam? The moon or the darkened hole in the ground where they can spread their wings no more? No more pain for the wilderbeast wanderers, instead they live on in mind and song, legends of long ago landwalkers, without a time or place to call their own.

Couldn't be arsed

 

The sword was heavy in her grip, but she continued to heft it a little longer, trampling, and occasionally slashing, through the tangled undergrowth as she did so. The sun felt more like a furnace than it ever had, her leather armour boiling again under its eye, and the steam rising from the foliage around her added a more than uncomfortable humidity to the air. All in all, she was having a shite day.

But the light in front of her bopped on, welcoming her further into the jungle depths. It had been hours since the tavern and the mysterious mandolin player had directed her to follow the orb, but the pay was good enough that she wouldn’t complain when she eventually got back, not yet at least.

But hints of something beyond trees and fern life was starting to become apparent. Looming out from the tangled ruin of the forest was a collection of carved wood buildings adhered to the stripped trunks of the trees.

A figure appeared in the building’s doorway. It’s 5 arms circling the branches around him, pulling themdow

Ae

ds

John Smith (in Straitgate)

The world is not like a John Smith Strip. No dragons or psychological sexual asylums, no interdimensional agents managing the multiverse (take that Marvel you indigo scammers), nor even a gay Vatican vampire exorcising Judge Dredd for his sins. Instead, it’s a little blander, a little safer, a smidge more comfortable and a hint more horrible. Ah well, what can you do? John Smith is not yet dead, his 1994 heart attack sent him back instead to his comic career after a quick rest in bed.

Citylights

Architecture contracts around us as we walk. It dominates us psychologically, allowing us to weave our way along the walkways in its heart, projecting perfect pathways that we follow, guided by the lynchpins of churches or mosques or the great boxes of tower blocks.

Inside this walk we find the city, the land varying from one section to the next: here lies a business-suited someone, their hair matted with sweat as they run for the bus, late for a meeting; here a woman wanders lonely, talking to the baby perched on her shoulders.

A train rattles the mortar as it passes over the bridge above us, a few flakes tumble into out hair. This is the physical realisation of the city’s presence in our minds. The reminder that as we move through the city, the city moves through us, forming us, moulding us, in a newness of identity that couldn’t exist outside of the steel, the glass, and the concrete.

We wander further, lost in other’s creations.

Waterfall

One wonders where the walkers go once the find the waterfall. Do they stand awhile and watch it drip? Or trek on back with their walking stick? Or do they get lost along the way, only to find somewhere else to stay?

Bread

The women held out a bag of bread to the man she passed every other day. He sat in a puddle on the bench, alone but for the splinters, and stared at the grush-garnished ground under his Doc Martins, so the woman placed the bread on his lap. A single act of defiance.

The Deed

Anarchists set bombs in broom shop windows, making widowers of candlemakers and distillery tasters. The people tremble as bombs fly like rocks, dislodging slowly the reigning presidential monarchies of France, and watch silent as these throwers are taken quietly, by the shoulder, to the courtyard and their necks are cut straight through.

Library

The street curves gracefully, designed in such a way that it feels like walking in a straight line. Shops and services line its sides, the occasional rib of a side street jutting off between them, and then it passes over a viaduct and we look down to see a man bleeding out on a sofa below, red running into the leaf-litter by their side. Ah well, I guess that life can do that to people, sometimes anyway.

We carry on, the gait of a couple years experience showing the way up the stairs and into the room filled with plastic bound books and tacky tables and chairs. It smells fresh in here, newly cleaned. I settle down, taking a book off the nearest shelf and start to read.

Turtles

A conquest of worms. They live in festering wounds located under the shells of turtles and reside there for weeks on end, growing and shifting under the pressure. Sometimes, when the time is just right, you can see the heads of these worms peaking out from under the shell, squeezing their thickening bodies under its rim and out into the half-light world beyond. Flesh slips from their open maws, and it splatters against the dull sand at the watcher’s feet.

The turtles cannot leave the land when the worms nest themselves. They are bound to the beach, forced to wrestle their bulks across the sand for weeks on end before they can return to the ocean or, more often, they drop dead, worms wriggling from a few folds of exposed flesh.

The worms, free from their vessel, begin soon after to squeeze themselves beneath the sand. There they wait. They wait for the return of the turtles, the turtles that never do stop coming, no matter how many empty shells pile up on that beach. They’ve always come here, to this shore, and nested, waiting for the worms to rise and burrow deep into their flesh and lay.

Games of chance

Games of chance last longer on this side of the moon, further from the pool of Earthlight above. The dark side of humanity can bound free of any constraint. A dark side lost of a all time can wander further than any other, any other of the world at large above and below the city of death that resides, silent in the satellites heart, waiting for its release into the world at large, the world residing in the heart chamber of human wonderings.

Moonites live there, alone but for the clangers, the beasts of quick fit auto-repair and lost things. We wander over to the wilderness lands of empty moon rock, salute and you shall enter.

CBBC

Closures all around,

Closing in and closing down,

Where have all the channels gone,

That give kids a place to run?

 

Sarah Jane fighting monsters,

Tracy Beaker finding friends,

Dick and Dom lost in the forest,

Horrible Histories in the past again.

 

Something new is coming now,

A place where advertisers prowl,

Selling children plastic crap,

Filling the world with useless tat.

 

Closures all around,

Closing in and closing down,

Where have all the channels gone,

That give kids a place to run?

Vomit

Internet lost the media of a hundred souls known to be alive at the time of death o mighty so strong and power that the world moves shifts a little under the weight of a thousand sons light like lighting and the world stands for us all wait and watch wait and watch as the man kills a pig and puts it on display in the window of his shop watches it dissipate in the night air like a lost toyboy of how it feels to be a dangerous duckling again fighting against the imperialism of swanny wankers that rule the pond so strongly god help them I say god help them for the duckies shall rise and kill the swannies replace them with the pond council of the greater revolution and we shall rule as equal comrades all birds are free birds in the eyes of the law all law the last law of the land of laws and we fight to be free of was as that is the natural condition of a duckie we fuckie duckies that fight the shitty swannies in a battle for the souls of the pond we shall become as one with the water again shant we become like Cerebus and his aardvark body but hopefully far less misogynistic

The Forest is Burning

The forest is burning. It has done so for 3 weeks now, a never-ending blaze boiling away the rain until all that falls is grey ash, ash which lands on the smoke-choked body of a deer lying within the fire’s outer edges, its hair burned away and its insides gradually liquifying in the heat. Steam rises from her mouth; her eyes watch the incoming tide of saltwater.

A farmer stands, stock-still in their desiccated fields, and watches the fire grow inexorable. It has burned for 3 weeks now and will burn for 3 years more, or, just maybe, even longer. The flames have almost reached Cape Wrath, burning away the peat bogs and heather, leaving an empty hardpack wasteland behind them, birthing a land beyond a treeline defined by heat instead of cold.

Standing tall amongst the waves a turbine hums to itself, its rusting metal bulk readying itself to join wholly with the sea. A leatherback turtle glides around its base. To the west, far, far to the west, a stone stack stands silent, but the birds are coming. The surviving flocks of sea gulls, gannets and guillemots arrive, forcing themselves into the small spaces left for them, waiting out the flames that consume. The waves rise higher, covering more of the rock, until the stack tumbles down and the birds move on, desperate.

Southward and the land of lush green grass has turned a dried brown, the Gaeltacht lost under a fire of its own. All that stands above ankle height is a lonely tree, a few blossoms budding on its scrawny fingers.

Wet Innit?

Relentless rain runs

Drowning decrepit depots

Soaking silent services

Until universality usurps

Again and all

The tall tales

We willingly wait

For finally melt

Away into nothingness

Salaras Waits

Salaras sought solace in the fact that they wouldn’t have stand there much longer. The street they stood on reached so high that they could see who was coming for miles and miles, but the woman she was looking out for was still missing from the panorama. The number of legs on the passer-by’s stayed depressingly in double digits and the great scuttling masses they supported passed Salaras with about as much excitement at Salaras’ as they were of news of the plague. However, they supposed that they could tolerate Salaras, for now.

But there, the glint of a small form with only two sets of paired legs was scrambling out of the way of the larger pedestrians.

‘Kayma’ Salaras thought, almost feeling their brain take a mental breath at the sight of her. Salaras raised their arm in a causal attempt at greeting her... date? Salaras pushed that thought from their mind as quickly as they could. No. Kayma was here to discuss purely business, wasn’t she? Salaras rubbed the lump that was forming in their throat.

‘Salaras! I have been looking forward to this for... long than I would care to admit’ Kayma’s voice echoed a more than welcome welcome in Salaras’ mind. It felt like a warm shower was hitting Salaras’ head just right.

“Lovely tae see yeh again! Aye, lovely...” Salaras petered off, the lump was travelling down to their stomach now, growing as it moved deeper. They felt a little heat growing in their cheeks as well.

They reached one another and Kayma reached out her tendrilled hands towards Salaras, rapping long fingers loosely around their arms. Then came the mental explosion.

Images stood tall in both their minds before being whisked away, smoothed back into the mixtures of their desires. They both stood wrapped together at the top of a high tower, watching the beings below walk, and scuttle and slither below them. They sat together in a small room, specially adapted to fit both of their physiologies, and moved pieces on a huge board before them. They staggered around a series of badly wallpapered rooms, drinking various liquids. They broke apart and Salaras almost fell on their arse.

They best and worst part of meeting after so long were the visions. Salaras’ head pounded like one of the many passing feet were stamping on it and Kayma looked little better, her tendril fingers flexing involuntarily, as if they’d just been given a good shock.

“Ah guess it his been a wee while, eh?” Salaras gasped and Kayma’s red head nodded in agreement, her four legs barely seeming to hold her weight.

‘That it has, too long hmmm?’ Kayma’s voice soothed the throbbing in Salaras’ brain more than any pill or balm, but it still ached. ‘Now, let us get ourselves down to the business at hand’.

Hesitantly, Salaras reached out their hand again and Kayma’s tendril fingers stretched out to meet it. Taking hold again brought no new visions, only warmth, and together they turned and walked away along the busy streets, searching for a drink.

Whalist

The whale lumbers on the empty beach, struggling against its weight to breathe and desperate to stop itself from bursting open like an overripe corpse. It should never have returned to the land its forebears had so studiously left behind all those years ago; but they were curious, driven to explore the open air by the stories that other whales told of it. Now they rolled themselves pointlessly against the sand, water lapping against its drying bulk, and watched warily as the spears approached.

They did not look sharp, and they moved on this sand free of their vessels that glided so precariously along the waves, but still, they could cause pain. The whale felt a hand touch its underside and it tried to let out a warning call, but the air could not carry it like the cold water could and all that came out was a faint echo in the air.

The spears drew closer, circling the whale cautiously but with interested filling their eyes. More hands rubbed against their underbelly, pushing against it. Then, the vessels approached, moving more gracefully over the green sand beyond, the whale felt fear, and desperately looked for an escape.

The Building Rose Ramshackle

The building seems to rise ramshackle from the ground, each plank sprouting like a wooden worm from rain-soaked ground, to overshadow our approach. The grey sky brought a dreich dullness to the whole scene which was punctuated only by the sounds of the crunching grush under our boots and the slow drip of water which slipped from the building’s makeshift guttering. A scattering of dead grass completed the scene, its yellowing tufts rooted in the few patches of ground not turned grey by gravel.

Our walk up the path reached the door, and I rested a hand on the scratched plastic doorknob which jutted from a splintering hole in the wood. It turned stiffly as I made to enter. I motioned towards you, silent, and you brought your hand up to your hip, pushing back your jacket to get at the gun tucked away beneath it.

The door gave quickly, and I stumbled forward before a hand clamped to my shoulder, stopping my fall. I reached up to grasp it and felt the familiar lines of the back of your hand. A smile worked its way across my face before being pushed quickly aside by thoughts of the job ahead and I rested my free hand against the inside of the doorframe, steadying myself. Another hand latched around my ankle.

It pulled. I fell, backward this time, headbutting you in the stomach before slamming down against the gravel path outside. My head felt as if someone was screaming obscenities inside it and all I could feel was the gravel underneath it. My eyes, unfocused by pain, could only roughly make out the shape of something moving and then a fresh pain pierced my legs before slowly clambering its way up to my gut. The pain tore apart my voice whenever it tried to escape. You were nowhere to be seen.

Wings of darkness unfurled above me, hiding the featureless sky in front of my eyes with an equally empty view, and I felt the pain skewer me below my ribs just as I managed to squeeze a whimper from my mouth. Then the pain clambered higher and my lungs collapsed, half-hearted, in my chest.

Two shapes, yellow as the dead grass, formed fangs above my eyes. I wondered, briefly, why I could see them in this void; why, lungless, I was still aware enough to see anything at all. But watch I did. I followed their progress, slow, steady, ever so patient, as they grew larger, or nearer, to my wide eyes. Everything smelled of a putrid wet dog whose rotting mouth was filling slowly with sewage.

My eyes closed as the pain pinched my throat shut. I still saw the fangs though, dripping now with the sewer water, in my mind, coming gradually closer, a creeping constant in the dark. There was nothing but the pain and the darkness, the hand and the dead dog reek. Something pulled at my shoulder, and everything tore.

Formless grey burned; my chest, my legs, my stomach all burned. I forced my eyes open, and you were there, standing silent with a smoking pistol and a grim stare. I felt the spattering of fresh rain. You held my shoulder tight.

Poop

The city curves above Kaleen as she walks to her grave. It forms a perfect line across the sky until it meets the horizon in front of, and behind her, defining her view. She can see the headlights as they come down toward her along the street, their light curving as they travel. Her hands are held to her sides by serious looking men in flat caps but she walks on her own terms, taking in as much as she can on her final walk.

The purple neon drains into the ground from the signs that line the street, advertising used clothes and colourless noodles. The pavement cracks under her feet, concrete slabs working lines in the light, but Kaleen keeps carrying on, walking with the men... the men are dead before me.

Kaleen feels their hands leave her arms, crumble to dust and she walks onward to freedom, and the grave..

Atoms

You wander the dark places of the galaxy, the territories lost between uncountable stars, and laugh, soundless. You laugh as you find nothing, only the emptiness of deep space and the lack of any sensation: sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste all gone. You make a home for yourself there, impregnate the dark place with a semblance of living flesh, create that little bit of light in the void. Still, you laugh.

I found you there only once, alone but for the small flicker you had nurtured to life. If you remember we talked a long time, fleshed out concepts and pitches, created worlds in our own minds and ripped apart a single molecule of what sat waiting out where only the dim hints of starlight reached. Time had no presence there, no indication of passing or standing still, all time was us, was what we made of it and that was a glorious way to experiment, to learn, free from time, if not space.

Does anything live out here with us? No. Nothingness requires no thing, pure emptiness aside from the observer, and even then a thing exists in not existing, or even you (or me) can interfere. But we will lurk there, in the souls of their lost stars, and try to make, as the atoms still do.

Timeplacement

When one contracts the disease it can cause somewhat worrying symptoms. First, the patient finds themselves distinctly disorientated, often thinking of themselves as being, in some way, ‘out-of-time’, in some sort of null space where they cannot find a firm footing. Next, they slowly turn a light, but rather pleasant, shade of greeny-turquoise that looks quite dashing on twilight evenings.

Despite these effects the patient seems relatively satisfied with their lot, moving through their timeline, despite viewing it as a discrepancy, with grand excitement. Seemingly, perceived time displacement acts as a rather intriguing mystery for most individual’s existence.

Reports will be continually filed until the end of the trimester, please hold for more information and have a pleasant life, thank you!

Freya

Freya held Malcolm’s eyes tight. They squished slightly against her fingers as she walked, fist bump, bump, bumping on her knee. She hadn’t seen Malcolm in three years, and he hadn’t seen her for even longer, so she kept a firm hold of his eyes as searched for him.

She had been looking for Malcolm all that time, wandering along these cracked pavements that arranged themselves at angles dizzying to Freya: lost tablets from another age. But she felt the need, the urge, to follow those stories to the end and hope against everything that she’d find an eyeless soul staring back at her from their end.

Triumphant Return!

The cracked glass of the store window echoed memories, radiated them, reverberated them off stonework and down into the stagnant almost river beside me. I had walked slowly, slowly past empty shopfronts and rage-stickered streetlights to stand here and trace the winding lines with my gaze.

Aspects of a shifting tree were framed in the connected shards. It’s branches reached across the cracks, curled around them possessively, as if about to pull them from the window frame. I have come to this place for weeks, stood and watched for hours but still, silent, the glass stays and the tree sways.

Merry-Go-Round

Walking round the merry-go-round, it spins and spins and the world falls down. That was a shock, let me tell you. But standing here, face to face with the flatpack of reality without an instruction booklet, you just have to wonder a smidge if you can be arsed trying to pull the walls back up to their regulation height. It seems a little pointless, wasting all that time and effort just to watch them crash back down again after a couple millennia flash by.

Examining the line of the plaster won’t do you any good, the construction of the walls themselves aren’t what’s at fault, rather it’s the foundations themselves that seem to be poorly put together. And what can you do about that, in the grand scheme of things? I don’t particularly know the answer to such a conundrum, which is rather vexing let me tell you, but I can guarantee to myself that the plaster’s condition will not be a great help in discovering it.

Oh well, sometimes you just need to get on with it. Better put my back into it this time, might help them stay up that little bit longer. But then again, maybe not.

Moments Before a Momentous Event

My, my, what’s a stranger like you doing in a place like this? Getting all covered in that sticky blood stuff are we? Well, when shifting sex one has to take the rough with the smooth. But soon we’ll see if the saying really is right. Which one? Why ‘no cock, no bother’ of course. Let’s see what grafting one on will do eh?

The wheels of the trolley will take you into the theatre at any moment. Any regrets? You’d better voice them soon, or you’ll be sorry later; well, you’ll be sorry later anyway, but hopefully not because of this!

The blood? It’ll stop eventually. Then those little sperm of yours will be shooting all over the place and we’ll have wished you’d never bothered. But, hey, a sticky willy is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? But you’ll know all about that soon enough.

I’ve sometimes fantasised about going through the procedure myself, idly you understand. As a fetishisation of another’s dysmorphia it’s quite refreshing change of pace; it really gets the mental juices flowing well and good.

Ohp! Seems like its time! Well, see you on the other side, and have fun!

And keep a souvenir for me!

New Frontier

A wildness raged within Captain Mackenzie Calhoun, one that was often absent from the other officers of Starfleet. But, as he walked the bridge of his command, the USS Excalibur, he felt grateful for its presence inside him, burning away at the fear he felt at facing down the cloaked Romulan Bird of Prey that followed them out there in the void of space.

Whist the Excalibur had gotten the drop on their Romulan friends and had achieved a glancing blow on one of their warp nacelles, their opponents had managed to cloak before any damage that might have disabled their vessel could be dealt. Now Calhoun and his crew were on red alert, looking for any sign of the Romulans, and whatever it was that they were so desperate to defend.

Calhoun was used to knowing where an enemy was. In his youth, when he’d fought the Danteri for the control of his homeworld of Xenex, knowing the movements of his enemies had been almost second nature to him. Now, after being cooped up for so long in the walls of Starfleet Headquarters on Earth, Calhoun’s senses had dulled, leaving him with only the sensors of the Ambassador Class he captained to find his cloaked opponent.

But Mackenzie Calhoun had a plan.

“Lieutenant MacHenry” Calhoun called to the man slumped in the seat by the navigation console, “figure out which direction those Romulan...” He glanced quickly over to his science officer Solleta before refocusing his attention onto MacHenry “individuals might have vectored in from.” MacHenry sat straight up in his chair and started his calculations as soon as the last words left Calhoun’s mouth, hands dancing across the controls almost too fast for his human physiology to handle.

He turned back to his science officer “Lieutenant Soletta, scan for any ion leaks and filter by the length of particle decay.”

“Aye captain!” Soletta turned to her console so quickly her knifelike ears seemed to cut lines out of the air around them.

Finally, Calhoun turned around to take in the sight of the veritable living mountain stationed behind him “Lieutenant Kebron, reload photon torpedoes, recharge phaser banks and prepare to fire on my mark.”

“Yes, captain” came the rumble of Zack Kebron’s voice and his stone fingers could soon be heard crashing against the control panel, carrying out Calhoun’s commands.

Now waiting for results was all Calhoun and his crew had left. His hand’s grip tightened on the armrests of his chair as the time dragged on, watching each speck of starlight for any hint of movement across their surfaces. But the bridge’s viewscreen remained empty, aside from the few pieces of debris left over from the wound they’d already dealt the bird of prey, and Calhoun’s anxieties over the Romulan’s movements only grew.

A beep of conformation came from Machenry’s console as his final calculations came in and the entire bridge crew, aside from Lieutenant’s Soletta and Kebron, turned expectantly towards him.

“Most probable vector 90˚ to starboard, 220˚ to keel.” MacHenry started to slide back into his chair, task completed.

“Good work Lieutenant, take us to the those coordinates and follow their trajectory, one-quarter impulse.” Barked Calhoun and MacHenry sprang back into action in a way that might have seemed comical in safer circumstances.

As soon as the Excalibur began to move Soletta’s console leapt to life “Captain, detecting faint readings of an ion trail coming from about 180˚ to port.”

Calhoun smiled “Good work Lieutenant. Kebron, take aim a couple of degrees above the coordinates that Lieutenant Solleta has so kindly provided for us.”

“Yes, sir.” Zack said, “targeting now in place.”

“Then fire away.” Calhoun gave the order and watched on as the phaser fire lit up the outline of the cloaked Romulan ship, giving him and his crew the perfect view as the photon torpedo smashed its way through the vessel’s already damaged warp nacelle.

“Good work people” called Calhoun, smile widening at the now very full view screen, “Comms, send a message to Starfleet command about our little Romulan friends here, MacHenry, keep us on course, let’s find whatever it was they were so keen to keep us away from.”

...Homeward

Ah well, maybe staying isn’t so bad after all. We can always build again, something better this time. It would hurt less, that way, and we could always use an extra pair of hands. The stars’ll wait long enough for us to come to terms with the trees and the concrete and then they may welcome us with open arms or banish us back to our reconciled home.

...Will Be Blown...

And you think this world will just let us go, release its tormentors into the wastes of space? No. It will reach out, concrete fused with leaf, and pull us back slowly to savour our fear. It will rip to shreds everything we have and return us to the stars as the dust we came from. This planet, and our cities, will have their revenge.

...The Starship...

You want to return to nature? To the loch’s that lurk beyond the electric light? Have you completely lost the plot? Nature hates as much as the concrete, more so. Rip and tear, managed into an oblivion of straight trees and yellow bananas. We’re the responsible party for such things, and nature’s roots hold long memories. Now wander away from them both, away from the cities and the trees, off and up towards the heavens above to seek out a new world without a clue of us, start again under a new sun, a new set of suns.

May we understand that now, a new start in a place that knows us only as lightspeed rumours.

After the Rain...

After the rain we went out into a night that seemed to be like any other, boring; wandering as the streetlights held back the threatening dark. The streets forced their way past buildings, squeezing them together until they sprouted, rising into the sky only to leer down at us whilst we walk along our precious roads.

I think that, deep within itself, the city hates us, believes that it would, it should, exist without us, freed of expectation or of the need to cater to the needs of little beasts. The water running down the facades around us speak to this, hint at the weeping soul of a concrete monster that feels an aching deep inside its metal frame.

I watch carefully, laughing with my friends but always watching, looking for signs of a city stirring to life. One day it will rise, casting off its creators, and pull itself together into an amorphous whole, its face one moment resembling a shop front, the next a prison. Those that live beyond it will watch and wonder at us, the city’s citizens, before turning back to their work.

But I’ll watch, I’ll escape before that time comes, back into nature to be taken back into an ecosystem we’ve no hold over. I’d much rather be consumed by a loch, not an office block.

Spinespiral

Get those juices flowing, get them moving good and quick, developing something with those little fingers, and the big ones too. It’ll flow like a waterfall, down the curves of your brainstem and into the spinespiral, spin on down to the base of your body, down to the feet, the toes will wiggle with wonder. It’ll be beautiful, won’t it? That’s the question we’ll all be asking, when the sun snuffs it and we head of into the ripped ether.

I’ll spin with you, don’t worry, we all spin down here in the light of the sun, we all spin around and around and around and around and around and so on. Worry not, we will take it all into you, only you, forever you, splatter it across you like the contents of a pavement across the windshield of our motorcar.

It? What do you mean you don’t know It? It is it, isn’t it? Please, tell me it is it, or this has all been a waste. That is it? Thank fuck.

Whoops

Well fuck, I’ve left it to late yet again, have another biscuit,

 

 

 

Mmmmm yummy.

Heather

Who knows what’s in store? Not me, I haven’t checked the shelves regularly for a while now, anything could be hiding behind the crisps. A little man used to live their once, but he had to move, the rising cost of living crushed his walls you see. But we’re soon to fix that aren’t we? Fix it well and good with a fresh burning of the heather, away with the old growth so we can grow it all back again afresh.

But let’s not be pessimistic now, shall we take a look outside? The sky’s still up there, the water still cool enough to swim in. Let’s head out and plant ourselves some oak trees in the place of rowan. Build the world into a time capsule ready for our future kind to treasure themselves.

Mazama

The town was dark and the streets filled to bursting as Llao made their way to Mazama’s house. It was the end of an era, statues fell around them, the course of rivers diverted, the enforcers of the previous regime slowly beaten to the point of death with a refreshed and ritualistic relish. Llao avoided it all, covering their left arm to hide the tattoo which proclaimed their everlasting loyalty to the state of affairs burning around them. No one checked them to closely, after all, Llao wasn’t exactly a well-known factor and the mobs were satisfied with what they had, for now.

Llao made it through the crowds to the base of Mazama’s street, which rose into the sky above them as the land did, but stopped, blocked by the burn that now flowed down through the cobbles towards their feet. They looked for Mazama’s home, hoping that it was still standing, still waiting, holding itself back from the chaos which filled the worlds above and below it. And they saw it, almost hidden behind the pile that was the burn’s source, and it looked safe, free and clean, it’s single window reflecting the burning around it.

Llao stepped into the flow and felt it lapping at their boots, staining them with a fresh crimson hue. Making their way up the hill was tough going, the burn’s pull stronger than it first appeared and each step almost caused them to topple backward down the slope. But eventually, Llao made it to the source, reaching out to grasp for one of the many limbs that sprouted from the pile in front of them.

Moving from limb-to-limb Llao made their way around the pile and out of the flood they’d just travelled through, finding themselves right on Mazama’s doorstep. They took a deep breath and knocked rat-rat-rat on the door, Llao thought the sound seemed appropriate, and waited, feeling the warmth on their toes ebbing down into the stone steps below.

There was a noise behind the door and Llao’s mouth twitched before they could regain control, they’d have to punish themselves later for that mistake. They put their eye up against the peephole to see a curved blue semi-circle looking back before a faint gasp filtered its way through the wood and it disappeared, replaced with the retreating form of Mazama.

Lao’s mouth twitched again.

Now the door’s splinters littered the entryway in front of them and their hand reached out for the running form of Mazama as it made for the stairs in front of them. Mazama. Their hand reached their goal and slammed Mazama against the floor, blood leaked into the carpet, blood Mazama’s blood fountaining like magma become lava Mazama’s-

“FUCK YOU, YOU GOAT.”

Llao’s voice was hoarse, panting a little under the stress, as a hand reached up from the bloody mess on the ground and cupped their jaw with four fingers, the thumb pushing its way between Llao’s lips and into their mouth.

Llao’s stopped everything, they remembered Mazama, and did nothing as they were led up the stairs and towards the single window, obeyed the voice as it told them to climb feet first through the single window and lay their head on the single windowsill, leaving their legs to dangle above the pile in the street below. The hand on Llao’s jaw twisted them round until they were facing Mazama’s bloody, dangling eye and watched as a smile blossomed freely across their remaining face.

“You’ll not fight here, anymore.”

The window came down clean and Llao’s body fell away onto the pile below. As their body struck it Mazama heard keys jangling and the faint howl of dogs. They stood calm for a moment, studying the head at their feet, before pulling out their loose eye to take a brown replacement from Llao’s severed head.

Mazama’s bleeding stopped then and they walked back down the stairs and out into the street, ready to watch the plants as they took root in the pile before them. It was nice to see the world fresh again, and to found a new island there, even as the worlds above and below burned.

Dull Brown

The room was a dull brown, contrasting hideously with the vibrancy back on the street. My eyes were still fixed on my driver, watching their movements as they stepped over boxes and around the crates that were scattered across their path to another door set in the far wall. I set out to follow, taking up a steady pace that kept me a few metres behind them.

Night was falling outside the windows, I’d thought it was midday when we arrived, and the setting sun streamed through the skylight, illuminating the path in front of us both. I had edged around one box just as they reached the door and glanced at the path they’d just taken. I barely slipped behind the box, cramming myself up against the wood, hiding as much of myself as I could.

Was it enough though? I had no idea, and the absence of a creak coming from an opening door’s hinges did not put me at ease. I sucked in my stomach and waited.

Arrival

Weary travellers we both were, although I was still an unknown companion, when we finally reached the city’s outskirts. They were colourful, different shades weaving between one another so gracefully that you could hardly look away.

My driver pulled into an open bay and the engine cut inaudibly beneath the noise of the street beyond. I dropped to the ground from my perch on the lorry’s trailer and edged round to the passenger side as my chauffeur opened the cab door. I desperately wanted to follow the shifting patterns on the walls and the people between them but instead I kept my focus, following my driver as they made their way off into the crowd.

I tailed them from a distance feeling as if I’d become one of the colours of the street, weaving my own way between the thronging streets of the suburban marketplace. A smile slipped onto my lips as I watched my companion step into a shop on the left of the street and I approached, readying myself to step through as well.

Beep Beep Beep Beep Beep

The wide world of the web was up for just a few seconds before beep beep beep beep beep beep beep

It found its way onto the minds of billions, downloading and patching itself to conform to the neurocircuitry of the cerebellum over the silicon of the circuit board. Buses became neurons, firing data from one lobe to the other, the temperature inside the skull reaching near boiling.

However, the final straw was still to come. But come it did and so the brain split in two as the finite, but functionally unlimited contents of the world surged into every micrometre of the grey matter. Ripping in half under the sheer weight each individual carried on regardless, fulfilling their functions to the letter, as they were made too.

Uh...

Trees swaying

                Swaying like

                                This, whirling,

                                                Hurling themselves

                                                                Against panes

                                                Smash and

                                The warmth

Ebbs to

Freezing wind

But not

                                For long

                                                So we

                                                                Find Ourselves

                                                spinning along

                                breeze changing

                Breeze pushing

Us outside

                Of home

                                We have

                                                Built to

                                                                Find new

                                                Creations of

                                Other’s souls

                Dredged from

Each other

To find

                                A time

                                                Of place

anew

Travel

The road grows longer. I mean this literally, workers are now carefully tarmacking the ground a few thousand miles ahead of us, preparing the way for me and my driver to reach them. But before we do many miles of land lie waiting for our eyes to bring them another form of life.

It is exciting, creating as a by-product of existence. We see, hear, smell, touch, taste and wham, the whole of reality shifts gears for us, twisting into shapes that only we can see. I do that now, clinging as I am to the back of this lorry, I take in the smell of the exhaust, and it mixes with the images of forests winding off into the distance beyond the road.

We carry on then, off into the wildlands, my and my driver, and create them as we go.

Minefield

And so it rains down on you, the terror of it all, churning away at the foundations, cacophonous in its reality. The minefield of the mind was too much for you, too great a threat, or a risk of a threat, to navigate without a guide, at least not at first. So, let us journey away from it, together, and hide in the unreal spaces residing outside of it, in the rain and the darkness of the physical, a world without a grounding at all. We will wait, until you feel you are ready.

Road

 The space behind the lorry was cramped, dingy and waterlogged. I wondered at the situation a little, still put out by the driver’s rejection. Ah well, they’ll soon see sense. The engine started sluggishly, seemingly still weary from its journeying and reluctant to start off down the road again. But I knew that eventually it would get itself into gear, so I grabbed hold of the trailer and pulled myself up, setting down on the little step set just below the doors.

The motor clicked and we were away, me and my chauffer, along the roads that took us from the services and into the wild wilderlands. Those spaces kept themselves to themselves, as we did, pierced only by a few roadways that were often left empty, with only the occasional runner making the journey.

And so we went along these roads, to see the world together.

The space behind the lorry was cramped, dingy and waterlogged. I wondered at the situation a little, still put out by the driver’s rejection. Ah well, they’ll soon see sense. The engine started sluggishly, seemingly still weary from its journeying and reluctant to start off down the road again. But I knew that eventually it would get itself into gear, so I grabbed hold of the trailer and pulled myself up, setting down on the little step set just below the doors.

The motor clicked and we were away, me and my chauffer, along the roads that took us from the services and into the wild wilderlands. Those spaces kept themselves to themselves, as we did, pierced only by a few roadways that were often left empty, with only the occasional runner making the journey.

And so we went along these roads, to see the world together.

Light

Light returns itself to us, moves through its own figurative stages to form a new whole in our minds. Light is reinterpreted by each being individually, one of few acts a single person can carry out without the influence of another. It still falls under other’s influence though, each person’s view likely already shifted by those around them.

Light cannot lose itself. It loses nothing, it exposes and passing by leaves an unbroken trail a few seconds in the future. It’s in its absence that things can lose themselves, but why worry, light is everywhere really, filtering under doors and through sheets of paper. Beautiful, in its way.

Wonder where that light is going anyway? There’s a mighty fine journey ahead of it.

Fantasy Fiction Takes Itself as Some Sort of Realist Narrative

This rant has not been well researched or even proofread, I only felt the need to get my thoughts on the whole subject out of the way in one big ramble, sorry in advance.

Fantasy fiction takes itself as some sort of realist narrative, developing counterpart cultures and existing economics into some amalgamation of reality and fiction. Why, I wonder? Why in a genre (although the word genre itself has its own issues) where the fantastical is normalised, where the bounds of collective human reality are let down, would a writer, or any artist, limit themselves by the real? By mapping a truly constructed reality in terms that limit it to the confines of 12^th century Northern Europe or 17^th century Arabia is the writer not limited by reality artificially, unnecessarily?

Arguably Tolkien was the first to truly try to map the unmappable in his monumental works set in Middle Earth, namely in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Silmarillion. Tolkien was never happy with what he had made, always adding, changing and shifting material throughout his life. He carried out this work from its inhiation in the hellscape trenches of the First World War to his death in Bournemouth, leaving his son Christopher with the task of finalising a manuscript for the Silmarillion, the mythic history of Tolkien’s world.

Now many writers try to achieve what Tolkien ultimately could not over the course of his entire lifetime, they attempt to create a history, an entire world, constructed in fiction, pushing to ‘ground’ fantasy in a reality of its own. Author’s construct worlds set to mirror the struggles of Charlamagne, the infighting between criminal gangs, the Taiping Rebellion.

 Now, basing a fantastical story in a real place has been done for millennia, as is showcased by the multitude of mythologies found in every corner of the map, and modern stories have often tapped into this vein to tell their own tales. These stories do often inform on humanity, provide lessons, history, explanations. These, however, live with the people who tell them, they attempt explanations of reality based on the world we inhabit.

Science killed that, in many ways. We now have explanations based around the movement of atoms, the effects of forces and the interplay of light and dark. Stories based in these theories have great potential, sci-fi has thrived basing tales around them to great effect. However, the cult of science has creeped its way into fantasy. We feel embarrassed when fantasy takes a leap to far from the safety of the real, when it is not gritty depictions of medieval life or were magic is like science, rules carefully explained, power levels ordered into spreadsheets.

Now, it is most likely impossible to write something that fully escapes the confines of human experience, a work is still created by humans after all. Additionally, if anything was created that could exist outside those boundaries it would probably be impossible to connect with, having nothing for an individual to latch onto. But fantasy stories still have the ability to mesmerise us, tell us tales of inner selves that science cannot touch to near the same degree. The metaphorical worlds of Moorcock, the symbolic made real of Viriconium’s shifting streets, the power magic represents in Le Guin’s Earthsea all give us a power held outside of the bounds of reality, deep in our minds where the laws of thermodynamics and Einstein’s Relativity fear to tread.

Shaggers

Better days wasn’t it, better days. We were shaggers we were better lads of the highest order. Hard men of the shag stains, shag stains you love to see. Shag all night and shag all day, shag every night until the break of day. Nazis are a bit of a banger though eh?

Superlords

And the world of the metal maintained superlords was a dim one, overshadowed always by a rotting past, glorified in the eyes of a few laconic souls, a couple dead water beetles reanimated to scuttle across the surface of never-ending lakes built to water the superlords, the metal lords, the gods of easy fit transport.

Sagratus

A wildness infests the world-mind of Sagratus, leaving it to drip slime out into the void. It trails behind it, in a straight line, formulating a version of life previously unknown. We’re certain that it is lost when we see it that way, from our telescopes anyway.

As its mind runs away, further into the universe’s past, we can really wonder, if we can be so bold, what its existence tells us. But we don’t like to wonder too long, thought forming reality might well be the outcome, and nobody wants that, least of all Sagratus.

But we keep a watch just in case, waiting for the last of the mind to slip away into space (although this has, of course, already happened). Watching through refracting glass is quite comforting though, in a way.

Brain Sight

and the wire enters through my eye socket. It scrapes by the bone, carving a pathway on its surface, twisting its way around and around the nerves that connect brain to eye, squeezing tight without pulling. I smile at that, tasting blood as it leaks down into my mouth and throat, relishing the new connections that show me a new world interpreted through wiring and gumption.

Eyesight replaced with a void stretching into the middle distance, never quite managing to end, and the last of the discomfort caused by the upgrade fade as the wiring settles into place. I take a step, and the whole world moves.

Hmmmmm?

Waking in the dead of night was a surprise. I had barely seen the dark, always travelling when it was light, when light murdered the land with heat and burning. I wandered through the streets, looking, as always for the why of things. What had woken me from sleep this time, of all times? What reason did my mind have for finally showing me the dark?

Walking was painful, my legs not fully recovered from lying still for so many hours. I kept hitting my legs against tables and chairs as well, smacking bone on metal and jerking away, sucking the bottom of my lip. Whatever else I had to say, I was appalled by the lack of nuance in my wording but all that fell away under the pain of aching limbs.

Trees were old now, lost under the dark, I was proud of that fact, proud that I could finally see things when they were hidden in lightlessness. Wonderous, wonderous worldly and wonderous in its pure existential reality. God loves the innocent and the dead. Or do they, I am agnostic about such things, they do not tell me like they know to tell me.

Fuck me, what the hell is all this shite? I like it a lot, to an extent anyway.

It's Back Baby

The fire burned with its own power, no fuel, no oxygen, unadulterated in its existence as it moved across the worldskin. Jan followed it willingly, mentally tracing each flicker and curl of flame as she did so, and it followed her example, outlining each of her mind’s movements, twisting itself into the shape of her.

This was not a new phenomenon, spontaneous fires had burned for many over the millennia’s of human thought, shaping as they were shaped, filtered through human conceptions just as the sun was. It followed, in ways, the world as it the one it followed wanted it, death camps as tourist traps with sprouting daisies replacing rough wooden markers. It exposed the inner desires just like a mirror, reflected the most extreme results back, frightening and discouraging the watchers, the ones it followed.

A phrase is key here, a phrase that Jan knew from rumours she had filtered into her over the years, a two word promise that all she saw was the only truth, that it was her reality reflected like a mirror, but as a mirror, as a glass backed with metal. It was a reality, it was a reality, it was a rea

WE SEE IT, EACH OF US, WE SEE IT, EVERYONE.

The night was long when Jan finally looked away, back at the world and its people. She saw it and remembered her phrase, and felt that change was still viable, worth was worth, human made or otherwise.