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.