This was going to be perfect. Also terrible. Yessamin made sure the table was set just so, the floating candles were lit, the ethereal fae string music was playing from an undisclosed location in the Otherlands, and the smells were just right. When the Otherlight finished, she spilled it across the floor, giving the apartment a thick sheen of moving color and brightness. Then she plated the pasta only a few moments before Brigette pushed through the door.

“I’ve got good—” Brigette stopped. She stared at the room. Her bushy red hair bounced as she shook her head in wonder, her hands spread out to run her fingers through a stray line of Otherlight.

Yessamin went to her. “Careful, it’s a little hard to walk around in here right now.”

“This is incredible.” Brigette’s head swiveled, following streaks of impossible color. “It’s like we’re in another dimension.”

Yessamin’s heart broke. The wonder on her girlfriend’s face was too much. She shouldn’t have done it this way. It only reminded her of how much she loved her for being non-magical and how much she desperately wished they could stay together.

“Just some tricks.” Yessamin kissed Brigette’s cheek and instantly felt regret. How many of those did she have left? She helped Brigette sit down and served dinner.

“What’s all this for?” Brigette barely looked at her plate. She was too busy enjoying the spectacle.

“I got some good news.” Yessamin hesitated, a glass of wine suspended in the air before her. “But wait. Didn’t you say something about news too?”

Brigette leaned forward. Her mouth squirked into that adorable, excited grin she got sometimes, and Yessamin melted back into her seat. How was she going to do this? Break the girl’s heart? Break her own heart too? But the Other Coast was far away, and only the magical could go there. It wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work. And it was the kind of opportunity Yessamin couldn’t turn down. Not without insulting half the fae court.

Which was exactly why she had applied for the job.

“I wanted to show you something.” Brigette’s smile faltered. “It’ll look lame compared to all this, but—” She sat up straight, concentrating hard as she spread her fingers out.

Yessamin stared. Her wine glass dipped and nearly crashed to the table. Otherlight crackled between Brigette’s fingers. It wove a thread-like pattern and solidified into a small rabbit. The creation hopped around as Brigette’s tongue poked out of her mouth, clenched between her teeth. Sweat dripped down her forehead. The rabbit held for a few more seconds before it dissipated into nothing, and Brigette collapsed back in her chair.

Magic. Actual magic. Toddler magic, but still, real magic. Yessamin stared in total shock. They’d been together for two years, and Brigette hadn’t shown a spark of aptitude in all that time. She’d know—Yessamin was constantly testing her. But that was actual Otherlight, a real spell, even if it was weak and not particularly well done.

“How?” she asked, breathless.

“I’ve been taking lessons.” Brigette seemed embarrassed as she tugged at her hair. “I mean, I should’ve told you, and I’m sorry I didn’t, but I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“But I thought—”

“I know, total squib, right?” She brightened as she sat up. “Turns out, mental block.” She jabbed her fingers at her head. “That thing with my mom? Really fucked me up. I’ve been seeing this wizard—”

“Who was it?”

“Bartamir the Mystic. He helped me deal with the trauma, and once the block was gone, we started doing lightwork, and I guess I’m a weaver.”

Yessamin’s stomach twisted. She stared at her beautiful, bright girlfriend and wanted to cry. “That’s… amazing. I’m so happy for you.”

Brigette faltered again. “What’s wrong?”

Everything. Absolutely everything.

“I have news too. I just…” Her wine glass teetered and crashed against the wall as she lost control of the spellwork. “Oh, shit.” They both leapt up to start cleaning, but Yessamin infused a little power to rebuild the glass from the shards. When was the last time she lost control like that? Not since she was a kid.

Brigette mopped up the wine. She was calm now. Her girlfriend was a lot of things, and perceptive was one of them. It made sense now that Yessamin knew she was a weaver. Those with direct access to Otherlight were usually the most in tune with their surroundings.

“Seriously, what's going on?” Brigette asked once the wine was cleaned. Smears of broken spell showed their mundane apartment beneath the illusion. “You’re acting weird.”

“I got a residency.” Yessamin let it spill out. She didn’t know how to do this anymore. Not that she did before, but Brigette’s new magic changed things. “It’s from the fae court to study biofueled Otherlight uses out on the Other Coast.”

“That’s amazing!” Brigette reached out for Yessamin’s hand, but Yessamin pulled back. “Why’s that not amazing?” she said, deflating back.

Ugly sickness crowded her guts. “The Other Coast doesn’t allow non-magicals. I thought that meant—”

She thought that meant they’d have to break up. That’s what she’d planned for the past week.

Brigette slumped back in her chair. She chewed her pinky nail. Yessamin hated that habit. “You thought that meant I couldn’t go with you. This whole thing—” She gestured at the apartment. “This was how you were breaking up with me.”

“Not breaking up,” Yessamin said in a hurry. “The residency—”

“But I am magical.” Brigette wasn’t smiling anymore. She wasn’t bright, wasn’t happy. Her face was flat and staring. “And that doesn’t change anything, does it?”

Yessamin pulled into herself. She knew, like Brigette knew, that it didn’t.

The residency was an excuse. It had always been an excuse. She could have found work somewhere else. There were dozens of projects she could have applied to and most likely gotten accepted in at least half of them. None of those would have taken her across the world to one of the most exclusively magical places on the planet.

Instead of telling her girlfriend that things weren’t working out, she decided it was easier to run away to study shiny slime.

“I’m sorry,” she said, voice small. For all her power, all her skills, she still couldn’t do the right thing. She was still a coward, no matter how hard she tried to be better.

Brigette pushed back from the table. “I just wish you could’ve told me sooner, but that’s you, isn’t it? Lots and lots of layers.”

“That’s not fair.” But it was fair. Very fair and very right. Only hearing it hurt.

“The layers were fun at first. Peel one back and get a glimpse of something new. But now I get it. The layers are walls, and you’re going to hide behind them forever.”

“Brigette—”

“It’s fine. Honestly, it’s okay. Go to the Other Coast or whatever and enjoy yourself. I’ll move in with my brother until I find a new place.”

“No, wait. I was going to say. You can have the apartment—”

“I don’t want it.” Brigette left the table. Her dinner was untouched.

Yessamin sat alone in a swirling light-filled impossibility. Its beauty was ruined where they’d cleaned the wine from the floor.

Another short one! I’ve been pretty inconsistent with sending these out, but I have a small backlog written now and they should start coming on a better schedule.

If you read this far, conjure up that like button so I don’t feel so alone all the time. Have a good week and I’ll see you in a couple weeks!

The mountains had always been their best defense. When he was a boy, they rarely got deliveries. The rocklans lived on the lichen and mushrooms growing in the deep caverns, while Master Shay taught him how to grow potatoes and how to forage in the spring. Their trips into town were rare and took a long week of scrambling over rocky terrain and scaling twisted goatherd paths. The return trip was worse. Borlan had to do all that, plus carry a bunch of supplies on his back.

But they persisted. The rocklans sang their low, mournful prayers, and Borlan grew up tending to them. He washed their bodies in the midafternoons, cleaned their sanctuary of crystal dust and little creatures in the evenings, and spent the rest of his days training in weapons, cooking, gathering, washing, and the dozen other little tasks it took to keep the monastery going. When Master Shay died, Borlan took the mantle of Lead Guardian, but that only meant double the work.

He cried to himself on the day the charioteers made it across the thawing lower pass. They were ugly, chest-rattling tears. He didn’t know any other kind, though. After he wiped his face and snorted out phlegm, one of the rocklans stood before him in the quiet corner of his armory room. It was one of his favorites; they had no names, but he named them anyway. Twisting, because of the curves of its jagged body, its lumpish form barely more than a pile of geometric stones melted together.

Its runes formed slowly like ice melting: I believe you should leave, Borlan.

He had to read the script a half dozen times before he could reply. The rocklans didn’t mind. Where he was twitchy and too fast, they were patient. Their time was a deep time.

“I can’t abandon you. I can’t abandon this place. Who will bring the offerings and light the candles? Who will clean the prayer rugs?”

It was an hour before Twisting replied. Borlan sat the whole time, watching the runes shape themselves, and even when he understood the message, he still kept his mouth quiet until the rocklan had finished speaking.

When the landmen come, they will kill you. They will break our halls and smash the Stone Lord’s carvings. You cannot stop what’s going to happen.

“But this is my home. I’m your Guardian. If this is what the Stone Lord wills, then I’ll die by your side.”

We know you will, but it would be a waste. We love you too much for that. Please, Borlan. When the sun rises, you must go.

He didn’t know how to answer that. The sun was dipping in the sky, and their conversation had taken up most of the day. The charioteers would be scrambling up the rough steps some long-dead people had carved a thousand years earlier. They’d be sharpening their knives and hefting their hammers. They’d come, like it or not.

Twisting was right. Borlan would die, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Once the charioteers heard about their monastery, it was only a matter of time before they came. They were a plague across Munish, and Borlan hated them. He cursed their name as he washed and scrubbed the sanctuary under the silent stares of the rocklan priests. Twisting returned to his place among them. They rarely moved and spoke only when they had something important to say, and a visit from one of their number was an enormous honor. Borlan should be happy.

Instead, he was miserable. That night, in his little sleeping nook wrapped in a ratty blanket, he imagined a thousand ways he might stop the charioteers: a rockslide as they scaled the western paths; a final stand in some narrow crossing where he could battle one man at a time; a heroic burst of rocklan magic that might boil their blood and splatter their dumb little heads into pieces. None of that would happen. Borlan knew it, and he hated it.

In the morning, the priests watched as he went about his business. He lit the candles and said the prayers as their runes shivered and shook across their bodies. They were so beautiful when they spoke to the divine. The colors and shapes slid across their forms in a gorgeous dance Borlan still didn’t understand, even after all these years. He watched them, crying, as his favorite light splashed across the strange, inhuman creatures. He oiled his armor and sharpened his scimitar. And finally, once the morning prayers ended, he crept out of the monastery and stood on the edge of the cliff overlooking the tree-splattered valley below, and he tried to imagine a life with the always-moving.

His brief visits to the town below were chaotic. So much noise. People were hungry and loud. They laughed and shouted. Their bodies shook and bounced and jogged around. They jostled him and thought nothing of it. But Borlan had only been touched by one person in his entire life, and only during weapons training. Master Shay had been kind, but years spent with the rocklans had made him distant and slow, just like them.

“Borlan!” A voice caught his attention. He looked down as a man picked his way across the roots and stone litter. “By the gods, I’m glad I found you. Shit-eating pathways are still half frozen.” The man stood, breathing hard at the edge of the monastery. Borlan watched and didn’t know what to say.

It was the tavern keeper from down below, a kind man named Norm. He wore heavy skins and leaned on a staff, out of breath. The trip this far must’ve been difficult for someone his age. His silver hair was pocked with snowdrift. Borlan offered him bread and water but didn’t allow him entrance into the great temple. Nobody but the rocklans and their Guardians could go inside.

“I came to warn you about the soldiers. Bloody fucking pricks are coming up here. Shit, I’m out of shape.” Norm gasped and leaned back on his elbows. “It’s goddamned cold up here. How do you stand it?”

Borlan didn’t know which part to answer. “I’m allowed a fire,” he said.

“Small mercies, I guess.” Norm hugged himself, shivering. “Listen, Borlan, I know this place is important to you. The priests or whatever they are take care of you, yeah? And you watch over them? But there are three companies of bored, annoyed, violent men coming up here, and they are going to kill you. I promise you that. Come back with me.”

Borlan was touched. Norm barely knew him, and yet the man had come all this way. “I can’t. This is my home.”

He looked past Borlan and toward the looming monastery entrance. His face twisted into a strange frown. “They aren’t people. You’ve got to know that. Come back to the town. I’ll find a place for you—”

“They’re my people.” Borlan backed away. “This is where I belong. Thank you for coming, but I can’t just leave them.”

Norm held up his hands. “I understand. I’m going to camp down at the bottom of the path for tonight, and I’m leaving tomorrow mid-morning. If you come with me, there will be a place for you. That’s all I’ll say. There’s no shame in it.”

Borlan retreated back into the monastery. His mind was moving too quickly for him to keep pace. It had been a very long time since another human had come all this way, and he couldn’t remember someone going out of their way to be kind to him. It touched him and made his throat swell, and when he sobbed in the prayer chamber, the rocklans gathered around him. They came closer than they’d ever come before, almost touching him, and Borlan hiccuped and spit on the floor at their runes.

All of them spoke to him. It was a silent chorus and the most beautiful thing he’d ever witnessed. They packed in tight, and he could almost feel their touch, but didn’t dare reach out. Dozens of the priests glowed, their runes shifting almost at prayer speed. Their bodies changed in a dance around him. They gave off a hum and a warmth he’d never noticed before, and he loved them so much his chest ached. Go, Borlan, please. They begged him. They pleaded in their way, even those rocklans who had never spoken to him before. We love you. Save yourself. Leave here and do not return.

It felt like a betrayal. A beautiful, incredible display of devotion, and a betrayal. This place was all he’d ever known, and the priests he’d been tasked with caring for were trying to send him away. It gnawed at him and felt like his guts were twisted into knots. He hated the rocklans for their mercy.

That night, he washed the monastery. He couldn’t sleep. He scrubbed and cleaned every inch of the halls, the storerooms, the great cathedral with its wide-open windows and its quiet rows of rocklan priests. Each spoke to him as he shuffled past them. We love you, Borlan. Save yourself. Leave this place.

He found Norm waiting for him as the sun rose. His favorite light slanted through the trees. The old man nodded as Borlan entered his camp.

“I’ve got a son about your age,” Norm said, packing away his things and kicking dirt over the smoldering remains of a fire. “You’ll get along, I think. Maybe not, but that don’t matter. I’ll find a place for you either way.”

Borlan took a long time to answer. They were well on their way down the pass, moving faster than was comfortable for him. But the charioteers were coming, and nothing would stop them.

“They’ll be okay,” Borlan said, and Norm nodded in answer. His hands were warm on Borlan’s shoulder. His arms were strong as he hugged Borlan against him.

“They’ll be okay,” Norm echoed, much too fast.

Hello again! Hope you enjoyed this one. I recently finished a long project I’ve been working on which means I should have more bandwidth for shorts. Hopefully that translates to more regular, twice-monthly posts for a while. I’m also experimenting with some tighter lengths—ideally under 2,000 words. Let me know if you liked this story, or even if you just read this far, by hitting the ‘heart’ button. It means basically nothing but it lets me know there are actual people at the other end of these emails.

Through the foggy glass, I watch leaves fall from a willow tree and onto a smooth lake. Around me, the city is cold, and a truck blares its horn at a man crossing in the middle of the street; they shout at each other for a few seconds. It’s always autumn through this window. In the distance, little speck-like boats float and bob, and I think today there’s a family having a picnic on the far bank. I stay there for as long as I can, letting the warm light filter across my face before heading to work.

An open seating floor plan: a pure nightmare. It takes a minute of scanning before I find a reasonable place to sit, but reasonable still means completely exposed to everyone around me and all their noises. Which doesn’t matter all that much since nobody stops to say hello and I wear headphones, but I guard my computer screen like a dragon with its horde, shoulders hunched, fingers curved. I go through my usual morning ritual of pretending to type important emails before pulling up the first few images.

Long swathes of desert. Small marks, maybe rocks, maybe cars. Forms, curves in the sand, a body or maybe a burned tire. I recognize one particular shape, and from there it’s easy to figure that the satellite photos were taken outside of Mosul, likely fifteen years ago midway through the Panic. I write up a report, include my analysis, and move on to the next image. Green, too much green, some churned dirt that looks like it could be a valley or a trench. Pre-Panic is my guess, somewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly Ukraine or Poland. Shapes in the woods, the hint of an outbuilding. Another report, another expert.

Hours of images flash across my screen. Drone footage, street-level phone pics, grainy dashcam stills. I figure out where they were taken, analyze any figures, buildings, objects, vehicles, or anything I find interesting, write it up on Form 8340, and submit the whole package.

I have no clue where the images come from. I don’t ask, and they don’t tell me. Some are old, some are recent. It’s rare to see actual living humans, but that happens sometimes. If anyone else in my office knows what I do for a living, they never comment on it, and I don’t bring up their jobs either. We exist in an unspoken arrangement. This place is strange, and we deal with it.

Sometimes, there are windows in the photos. That’s a dead giveaway for post-Panic. They’re always at oblique angles, hard to see through, but obvious in the way they hang out of sync with the rest of the image. A window high up on a concrete wall, a window in the middle of an old oak tree, the edge of a window buried in mud and halfway drowned in a lake. Strange light, incongruous shapes. Whenever the windows show up, I take out my phone, snap a picture, and save it for later. If anyone ever caught me doing that, I’d probably end up thrown off a bridge in the middle of the night with a black hood over my face.

There’s almost nothing visible pre-Panic on the internet these days. It’s all buried under geologic layers of dense fake information, bot-generated news cycles, worthless SEO junk, and arguments between AI clones. The real stuff’s in there somewhere, but it would take an archaeologist and a fine brush to sift through a mountain of dust just to find the first corner of the truth.

These pictures, though, they’re real. I don’t know where they come from, but they’re the first glimpse into a world nobody really remembers anymore—a world everyone’s trying very hard to forget. Back before the windows showed up, when the world lost its mind, and the very bad years right after. Back when blood splattered roadsides and corpses were piled in mass graves, right up until the survivors decided that, actually, the windows aren’t a big deal after all, so long as everyone agrees to pretend like they don’t exist.

Work ends at five-thirty. I have one last stop to make on my way home. Every day I tell myself I’m not going to do it, that I’m going to go straight home, that I’m not going to torture myself. And every day I stop anyway. It’s a window outside of an old train station, shuttered and ruined at this point. The window faces an alley behind the ticket building, and nobody’s ever bothered to cover it up. The glass is dirty and greasy, but the view is the least obstructed in this whole city: a long, undulating landscape of snow stretches past a frozen lake and into a copse of trees. Footprints mark a little girl’s passing.

I know it was a little girl because she told me where she was going.

Which is impossible. Nobody goes through the windows. Break the glass, and it just shows up somewhere else. Try to pull it open, and you end up staring at a wall.

But there were no footprints before, and there are footprints now, and Melanie’s been gone for fourteen years.

If she did it, I don’t know how.

But I’m going to figure it out, and I’m going to bring her home.

***

The window on Second and Market was covered over by wooden boards in the first weeks of the Panic, but they came loose a while back. I stand on my toes and look through at a hillside scarred by what looks like artillery shells. The sky is purple-gray, and it’s raining. Mud clogs the broken earth, and small clumps of grass cling to each other. Only the small rivers of rainwater move in this window. “I’m not sure what you think you’re going to see through there,” Janine says. She’s looking around the block, waiting for someone to stop and complain.

“Don’t you want to look? Aren’t you curious?”

“You know I am.” She’s small, with dark hair and dark skin, and has some of the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen. “But this is too public. You know it freaks people out.”

She’s right, and maybe that’s why I can’t help it. The transgression is part of the appeal. But I don’t like what that says about me.

“You have something for me.” I push the board back into place and turn toward her.

Janine takes a thumb drive from her pocket. “Footage from Colorado. But I’m not sure you want to see it.”

I count out a stack of twenties and hand it over. She gives me the drive. “Pleasure as always.”

“You know I can’t promise it’s real, right? I mean, how many of these have you bought from me now?”

“You definitely sold me at least a couple of verified fakes.”

“Maybe it’s time to step back.” Her eyebrows knit together in pity. “You know, think about yourself for a while.”

“Thanks for the information.”

Back home, the video plays: it’s blurry and shakes, but it clearly shows a window perched on the side of a rusting train car. A person approaches—black, skinny, hair in dreads—and reaches up for the ledge. The camera dips and refocuses. Was there a cut right then? The person pulls themselves up, and I expect them to hit the glass of the window—

But they don’t. Instead, their head goes through.

I lean forward, heart racing.

Half their torso is inside. Head gone, shoulders disappeared. Legs kick like they’re trying not to fall. Then the camera shakes again, and the person drops back out of the window. They land on the ground, and the camera moves; whoever is filming starts running. The video shows the ground, then ends.

I watch it fifty more times. I run it through analysis software, looking for tell-tale artifacts that will prove it’s generated. Nothing hits. Everything looks real.

Whoever that is, they got through.

***

“It’s fake.” Thomas shoves the drive back into my hands. Above us, a window glows with a strange bluish light. It’s too high on an old water tower, and I’ve never bothered to climb up and look through. The light makes me wonder, though.

“Come on. It can’t be fake. I went frame by frame. I spent hours on this.”

Thomas looks around and shakes his head. “It’s fake, Jay. I know how much you want this, but it’s fake.”

I stare at the drive. I stare at Thomas. He’s heavy, with a shaved head and bags under his eyes. If I’m good at recognizing places in grainy drone footage, he’s good at rooting out doctored images. We’ve done work for each other in the past.

“Tell me how you know.”

“There’s a cut. It happens right before the guy goes into the window. But it’s there.”

“I went over that fifty times. It’s not there.”

“Look again.” He hesitates, looking over his shoulder. “Seriously, are you okay? I know this is important, but lately—”

“I’m fine.” I step away from him and onto the gravel path. “Thanks for your help.”

“Just go easy,” he calls after me. “They’re not worth it. Just ignore them like everyone else does.”

Footsteps crunch over rocks as I head back to my car.

***

Fluorescent lights glow. Carmine talks on the phone for almost a half hour. She tries to keep her voice low, but it’s an open seating plan. We all hear, and we all pretend we don’t. I click through my stack and write my analysis, and every third job I pause to scroll through the video again, desperate to see whatever tells Thomas spotted. But I just don’t see it. The cut’s not a cut—it’s just the filmer moving around too much, which makes it look like there could be a cut. But there isn’t one.

If this person got through a window, even halfway, that means it’s possible. I’ve seen hundreds of videos over the years of the windows, sometimes showing monsters coming out, sometimes showing people diving through, and this is the first one that seemed remotely plausible.

The way they only go halfway. Like they’re afraid to get trapped on the other side.

It takes an afternoon to locate where the video was filmed and another week hunting down rumors before I find a name buried in a forum for window freaks.

I’m not the first person on this trail.

***

I wait in the bathroom at the Piedmont Triad International Airport for two hours, watching people before I’m sure nobody followed me. I flag a cab to a small neighborhood on the north side of Greensboro. Red brick 1950s ranchers line a hill. The woman who answers the door tells me to go away, but she doesn’t seem surprised that I’m asking around. I duck behind a trash can when a car rolls past with its lights on, going much too slowly.

I try again an hour later. This time, the kid answers, and now I can see that he’s a kid: no more than sixteen, wearing baggy jeans and a basketball jersey hanging off his shoulders. He tells me to take the path into the woods right behind the street sign and to keep walking until I find the trains. He says the video is fake, and if I want to prove it, I can find the window myself. He tells me not to knock again.

***

Leaves crunch underfoot. The window is just like in the video. It hangs in the center of an old tanker train left to rot and rust. There’s a gravel path leading back behind a chain-link fence, and the tracks are overgrown with weeds. The window is uncovered, and there’s graffiti sprayed all around it: Nobody’s Coming.

I’m worried my shaking hands won’t be able to get through when I reach for the glass. I’m sick, and my mouth tastes like dirt. It’s cold when I finally touch it, cold even though everything around me is humid. The other side is snowy, an old country lane disappearing around a corner, suspended in time. There’s a light nearby—maybe a village in the distance? A hint of people, somewhere beyond.

But it doesn’t open. It doesn’t yield to me. I push harder because I’m tired of tracking down all these fake leads and finding nothing. She’s been gone for so long, and every day I fail is another day she’s trapped on the other side. Do these windows go to the same place? Is it like our world, but different? Or are these all little portals into different worlds, and even if I get through this window, it wouldn’t make a difference? She’d still be gone.

The glass bends. It wobbles and flexes like plastic. I pull back in shock and stare, not sure if that was real or not. I’ve never felt it before. The glass is always glass, sometimes warm and sometimes cold, but always solid.

That felt thin, like if I had kept pushing, it would have let me slip through.

I reach out again. I’m terrified. But there’s a crunch of tires on gravel nearby, and a black sedan pulls into view, its high beams on even though it’s the middle of the day. I squint over, shielding my eyes, but the windows are tinted black.

It honks twice. Short bursts. I watch, and it watches me back, and I don’t know who’s inside, but I can guess.

***

“It flexed,” I tell him, crouched in the darkness behind the bowling alley. The sound is loud back here with the back door cracked open. “I swear, I felt it.”

“You’ve been really wanting this for a long time,” Jason says. His face glows as he smokes. “You sure you didn’t imagine it?”

“It was real.” I tell him about the kid, the video, the car. He nods along. “It’s possible. She could’ve gotten through.”

“Let’s say she did.” He drops the cigarette and stubs it out. “What’s that change? You can’t get through her window. What does it matter if you got through another one?”

I open my mouth to explain the theories but stop myself. I’ve known Jason since grade school, and he’s heard it all before. He knows my obsession better than anyone else. I don’t know why he still puts up with me after all these years. I can almost see myself from his perspective: manic, paranoid, too far gone to help. Except I’m right this time.

“She’s out there,” I say, and he nods along because he’s heard it before, and what else is there to do but listen again?

***

I prep for nearly a month. It’s not easy gathering supplies without tipping anyone off. I shop in cash when possible and wear a surgical mask to hide my face. What I can’t find locally, I buy online with pre-paid VISA cards and have it sent to the bowling alley, where Jason lets me pick it up before they open.

Images float across my screen at work: an abandoned car overgrown with weeds, a forest stretching endlessly outward below a rocky canyon, a series of suburban homes. Glimpses into the world before it ended. The thrill of finding true pre-panic moments fades as my plan comes into focus. Beside the ATM machine in an old WaWa that never got an update, I peek through a window into a dusty old barn. Hay is stacked in the corner, and it never seems to rot. Dust motes float across slanting sunlight. It’s always day there.

The flight is unimaginative. I park near the edge of the woods and leave my rental there. Someone will pick it up. Jason has a key to my apartment, and he’ll find the meticulous note I left detailing my banking info, my passwords, and everything he’ll need to take care of what I’ve left behind.

The window is still there. I don’t know what I expected. I’ve seen videos of people trying to smash them, burn them, or break them open, and it never works. At best, if the structure they’re embedded in is completely demolished, they show up somewhere else a few days later, usually nearby.

I’m terrified as I climb up to it. The old country lane is still there, still cold and snowy. Atlanta’s hot, but where I’m going? I shrug my backpack higher on my shoulders and take a deep breath.

What if she’s not there? What if the windows aren’t looking at a mirror place, but at different places? A hundred thousand different worlds instead of one? But it doesn’t matter. I have to find her, and this is the only way.

I push against the glass, and it flexes again. I push harder until it feels like thin cellophane under my fingers. Ringing fills my ears, and my fingertips are numb. I push, surging forward, and feel the membrane snap as I topple inward.

I hit the ground hard. I wasn’t really bracing for it. My wrist hurts, and I’m so cold it makes my ears hurt. I pull my jacket from my backpack as I get to my feet and look around.

It’s dark. Sometime after midnight. The lane curves around a stand of trees. I smell pine and dirt in the crisp air. The clouds look right. The moon and the stars look right. I turn back, and the window is stuck in the side of an old crumbling shed, the roof dusted with snow.

I see the train yard: gravel, weeds, blowing leaves, except finally, something is wrong. People flit across like moths. A face appears at the glass, staring in before disappearing again, moving way too fast. More faces, and the scene pulses, light then dark. Ten heartbeats between night and day. I look around, and this place hasn’t changed, and that’s when I realize.

Time isn’t synced. Here, time is slow. But over there? Every day/light cycle means a day’s passing.

I stand there and count them. A week’s gone by in almost an instant, and there are so many people studying the window now, covered in protective equipment, vast apparatuses unfurled around the structure, staring in at me, studying, appearing and disappearing like spiders under a crawlspace, skittering around. One face keeps coming back.

It’s Janine. She looks almost sorry.

By the time I get to the end of this road, everyone I know will have moved on or died.

I can go back. It’s not too late. I’ll have lost weeks, months, years, something like that, but it isn’t too late. I’ll be famous over there.

Or I’ll end up in a black hood and chained in a basement.

There are footsteps in the snow. They’re vague and filled in, but someone came through not that long ago. I picture Melanie, still little. How much time has passed for her on this side? Weeks? Months at best? She’s not going to recognize me, but that’s okay. I’ve aged, but she’s still caught exactly when she left. The window behind me pulses with faces, motion, and light. I’ve got a lifetime of stories to tell her.

Hello folks, if you’re reading this, thanks for sticking around. I’m way off schedule at this point, but I have a couple stories in the bank and I’m ready to restart regular sending.

Please, if you liked this story, share it! Post to Reddit, email a friend, whatever. My stories show up twice per month (or less, obviously) and they’ll always be free. Also hit that like button, it keeps the lights on in my slushy brain.

Inside, the halls were damp with sea spray and humidity. The real work stations, Doug kept saying, were climate controlled, but everywhere else was subject to the constant elements. And there were elements, no matter what they did. One hall had a wide swirl of black mold, which three janitorial workers were diligently scrubbing away. It happened more than they liked, Doug admitted. It was just part of the job.

That didn’t bother me at all. I had a desk on the third floor in the back corner with three other component specialists. Doug dropped me off and disappeared somewhere else. My workmates introduced themselves: Jan from Eindhoven, Richard from Leeds, and Melanie from Boston. Jan showed me the workstation, walked me through logging in for the first time, and then proceeded to pretend like I didn’t exist. And none of that mattered.

I had finally made it.

“You want to see where they make it, don’t you?” Melanie from Boston leaned over my desk. She had a birthmark on her forehead, slightly off-center.

Steps echoed as we descended through airlocked doors and onto the main shop floor. Melanie didn’t talk much and if I was expecting some sort of wink and nod and female camaraderie—two young women in a field dominated by older men—I wasn’t getting it from her. Which didn’t matter, since I was too busy staring at my future. Alcor Electronics churned with activity, with lab scientists in white coats and repair teams in neat uniforms moving from one station to the next, the center of the world’s future, where impossible wires were spooled from magic and braided into strands.

The factory was almost a disappointment. It looked like a dozen other factories I’d seen over my short career: immaculately clean, orchestrated and precise, machines clacking away through their specialized tasks. Under it all, a low hum that started in my toes and spread up into my spine like an ink blot. I felt the wires more than saw them.

“How do they do it?” I asked, desperate to understand. This was why I’d come here, why everyone was obsessed with Alcor. Wires which somehow transferred data instantaneously and seemed to speed up internal computation clocks, which wasn’t even possible. They’d discovered something, was all the detail anyone could get from the lab.

“That’s not our department.”

**

Light flickered and dimmed. Power dropped constantly. Doug never showed his face on our floor again, but he was a constant presence in my email. Tasks flowed from upon high.

The Others—what I began to call my three workmates—gossiped about strange corners, doors to nowhere, people going missing. “Jokes,” Jan said when I asked what they meant. Melanie’s smile was plastered on. “All jokes, don’t you worry.”

As the newest member of the Efficiency Team, it was my distinct pleasure to sit in front of the computers as our models churned through optimization schemes. This wasn’t so bad: the wires doubled the speed at which the machines worked and what should’ve taken weeks was only an afternoon. I accepted prompts, made tea, and double checked the system was still processing. There was nowhere else in the world I’d rather be than right there at the tiny desk cluster working for the leading edge in computing technology, tapping the spacebar twice every hour to keep the monitor from cycling off. Even the boredom felt important.

During my third week, I heard voices. Vague, indistinct whispering, and when I turned to look there was nobody nearby. I began to lose things. My wallet went missing, my keys, the laces from my left shoe. Jan dutifully wrote down the items and promised to keep an eye out for them. He didn’t seem optimistic. Doug replied to emails with lots of exclamation points and a few strangely inappropriate emoji.

The bathroom door locked itself. That happened twice. The janitor broke it down both times and seemed more tired than anything else. My car’s battery died, even though I was sure I didn’t leave my headlights on, but a man from marketing gave me a jump without much comment. “Happens a lot,” was all he said.

Low rumbles echoed through the basement of the facility. Doug’s messages seemed garbled, like he couldn’t find the right keys. When I asked for clarification, he seemed mystified: what email was I referring to? He never answered his phone.

I was more than happy to ignore all that strangeness.

We were changing the world.

***

I tried asking other people about how the wires worked. Jan brushed me off more than once. Richard winked at me and that felt creepy enough that I pretended like he didn’t exist. Random scientists in the break room gave me odd looks and smiled through excruciatingly awkward dodges. I bugged managers, media team members, compliance officers, and nobody had a good answer. “Not my department,” most of them said. Some kind of running joke.

I started to wander the building. Dead lights darkened half the corridors. Most of the doors were locked and didn’t seem to have a purpose. I tried to get on the elevator, but the lower levels were all blacked out. The stairwells smelled damp, and they were blocked by electronic gates beneath ground level. My security clearance wouldn’t open them. Moisture ran down the concrete, and I heard something gentle lapping against the walls below, like the deepest sections were all flooded.

I got a report of you taking long walks, Doug said in an email after a month of this. I know you’re just killing time between scenarios, but please stick to our floor, alright? People are starting to notice!!

He was so nice about it.

**

Melanie stopped showing up for work and none of the Others seemed bothered. Richard had that creepy strained smile. When I pressed, Jan only shrugged and said she was taking some personal time off, but how long she’d be gone or what she was doing, nobody had an answer. Her workstation was unchanged. But she wasn’t there.

The thumping noise got worse. It peaked in mid-afternoon and died down by the time I left for the day. Lights kept flickering and dying, and no matter how many times the maintenance staff changed the bulbs, they wouldn’t last for more than a few days. Dozens in and out each week. A vast warehouse of dying light fixtures. The water in the bathroom stopped working for three full days, and management only said they were working on it. I lost the laces to my other shoe. My keys appeared one morning in the top drawer of my desk. Jan said he had no clue how they’d gotten there and maybe I’d just missed them this whole time.

Nobody wanted to talk about the noise. The constant low-range groan that crawled deeper into my bones every second I spent in that place. I ran my simulations, I wrote my reports, and sometimes I felt like I was a part of something important. But there was still the noise.

***

I got Melanie’s address from the employee directory. I didn’t expect it to be that easy, but I guess Alcor didn’t care about privacy. I took a half day that following Monday and drove out to her apartment building. It was nice, modern, the kind of place a young, well-paid professional would live. There was no doorman, only an intercom and an electronic lock system. She sounded surprised I was there but let me up.

I expected someone tired, gaunt, broken-down, sickly. How could she be anything but decrepit and on her deathbed? How could anyone walk away from our technological miracle? We were at the center of a world-changing shift in processing ability and what we did now could reverberate down the ages. That was our immortality.

Nobody in their right mind would give that up.

The Melanie that answered the door didn’t match the Melanie in my head. She smiled big, and I realized it was the first time I’d ever seen her looking happy. The bags under her eyes were gone, her hair was thick and well-kept, and her skin almost glowed.

We sat at her little kitchen table. Her apartment was tidy and decorated with draping plants and mid-century prints. “Have the dreams started yet?” she asked, pouring tea, and only shook her head when I pretended like I didn’t know what she meant. “You’ll get them soon. Everyone does.”

I probed around the edges of what happened. I asked her questions: did something go down that I wasn’t aware of? Did Richard try to touch her or something? Was she physically unable to keep working? She answered as patiently as she could, but made it clear she was heading out soon.

“Richard’s fine, just weird, and Jan’s wrong. I’m not going back to that place. I know it’s hard, but just do me a favor, okay? There’s an override in the elevator. Security knows about it, but nobody really cares. Flip open the bottom hatch and press the blue button. That’ll get you into the basement.”

“Why would I need to go down there?”

“Just take a look around sub-level three. And when the dreams start, don’t take them literally.” Her smile faded and she put her hand on mine. Her skin was warm and intensely human. “Walk away when you’re ready and don’t look back.”

***

The wires were a miracle. Instantaneous transmission. Processing clocks doubled. And no extra power draw. They broke all kinds of rules and sent the scientific community into a frenzy. Long, aggressive articles claimed the wires were fraud, were snake oil, that Alcor was somehow faking the miracle. Except Alcor wasn’t hiding the wires away. Those same scientists could see for themselves. Their research labs placed massive orders, yards and yards of enormous wound spools of the stuff, and every test they ran came back with the same result: the miracle was real.

But the papers continued, a steady stream of vitriol, denying the proof they saw with their own eyes, and the blogs backed them up. The world teetered on a second computing revolution, but nobody wanted it. Alcor was dragging everyone forward, even as they struggled and screamed. The wires were going to change everything for the better, and each new post claiming some potential horror, some contrived reason why the wires were actually bad and wrong and evil, each one made me want to get involved even more. I wanted to be at the center of history.

It took me three weeks before I followed Melanie’s instructions. Maybe fear, maybe just frustration, kept me churning through tasks. Doug’s emails came at strange hours. The bathrooms were locked every day after three for the safety of everyone involved. I lost my keys again, and that’s what finally did it. They’d been right there, and then they were gone.

The blue button looked just like the one in my dreams. Except my dream button opened its dripping wet maw and pulled my fingers into its mouth lovingly before biting them off and chewing them to pulp. This button, the real button, was only plastic. It clicked and the elevator dropped down to the sub-basement level.

I stepped out into a damp concrete corridor. Lights continuously flickered overhead as if the power down here was tainted. It felt like a horror movie, except there were men and women walking past, most of them friendly, some of them in lab coats, and none bothered to ask me what I was doing. They probably assumed I belonged, that I was one of them.

And I was: I wanted this place more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. We were promised so much when I was younger. We were told computers, technology, the internet, it was all going to change the world and make things better.

But it hadn’t yet. Instead, technology amplified the problems that have been around forever, the same old stupid human failings that we couldn’t ever seem to solve no matter how hard we tried. Very smart people could sit around and point out all the ways we’d screw up, and we’d go ahead and screw it up, and none of that would matter. Writers had been doing it for centuries, going all the way back through recorded history, from the French Revolution to the implosion of Athenian democracy. Technology was supposed to bypass all those stupid failures, or at least it was supposed to give us an escape hatch through which we could wriggle ourselves and find something better on the other side.

But there was nothing else.

Then Alcor came along and created something so incredible it made people panic, and the same hate and denial that had always been there lurking inside the worst parts of people flooded out in mucky waves.

Melanie was wrong. She had to be wrong. She’d turned her back on the miracle and I had to understand why. I had to figure it out, because what if those voices had been right? What if, despite everything, they’d been right, and they didn’t even know why they were right? I couldn’t handle it, and so I started opening doors.

There were labs in the basement. I pretended like I was looking for Billy Goldman, but nobody had ever heard of him since he wasn’t real. This place buzzed with activity and strange flares of that bad feeling and the hum was even louder down here. It was so deep I could almost forget it was there, like it had become a part of my heartbeat. I kept going, door after door, following that corridor, until I reached another stairwell. This one plunged down and down, the walls damp and moldy, and the smell was overwhelming. A thick, fishy scent, like whatever would be left if the entire ocean boiled, reeking and deeply alive. The stairs ended at another door, dimly lit by track lights around the floor, and I pushed through.

It looked like an observation room. The far wall was all glass, but it looked out into a black chamber with only the faintest suggestion of light. There were couches against the opposite side, chairs lined up along the other, and recording equipment on a table. Computers hummed softly, processing something. The floor squished underfoot, the rug lightly wet, and mold bloomed on the ceiling like a massive black spiderweb. I walked forward, toward the glass, feeling sick as the hum intensified, like I was standing right next to its source.

I stared into the chamber through the glass and caught only hints. The light from the hallway leaking under the door reflected my own face back at me. It was a bare rock cavern, absolutely enormous, easily the size of the entire research facility and then some, roughly chipped away, and I thought I saw water lapping a few feet below the window line. Steel support beams crossed the ceiling.

And something was out there. Something dark and massive, a mountain in the center of this place. The humming was coming from that thing, and when I pressed my hands to the glass—

Scales caught the light. Bloody, rotten flesh, like a fish scraped with knives, scabbed over and greenish-black. Like the Alcor colors. Squid-like, but also lizardish, a bulbous head and a long torso, fins or maybe legs like fins, a ridge-lined spine and small thorny protrusions, and a long maw with the barest hint of an eye. It filled the cavern to the brim, lying sedate in the water with enormous bands of steel wrapped around its throat, its torso, its arms and legs, thick cables connected to the rock keeping it in place. Oozing sores glistened oil-slick rainbows. Wounds covered it, geometric and purposeful, as though it were being harvested. And if it had opened an eye at that moment, if it had looked at me, I would’ve known what it was. What it was thinking and what it felt.

Instead, it remained dormant. The hum in tune to its massive breath. I held up my phone and took a video, hand shaking, not thinking about anything but the truth at the heart of everything I loved, before leaving that place behind.

**

“There’s nothing you can do about it.” Melanie stretched her legs out and watched an older couple walk along the park’s path. “Even if you posted that video, nobody would really believe it.”

“They would,” I said because it had to be true. “At least, someone would.”

“Okay, and Alcor would spend their billions ruining your life. What’s the point? What would it even change?”

I looked at the coffee in my hands. “That thing is the secret. That’s how the wires work.”

She seemed more resigned than sad and put a hand on my arm. I flinched slightly, and realized I hadn’t been touched in a while. Not since the last time I saw her three months back. She looked at me like I was a skittish animal. I wondered how I seemed from her perspective. Greasy hair, bags under my eyes, aged ten years in less than two. I must look like she did back when I’d first started: worn down and dangling over the edge.

“Everyone figures it out eventually and nothing changes. Even if the world knew, I think most people would shrug and move on with their lives. Maybe they’d even be relieved. Mystery solved.”

“It’s horrible.”

“So’s everything else.” For a few brief moments, I caught another flash of the Melanie I’d first met: hunched and tired, worn down with the weight of what she knew and all the strange hauntings attached to that place. Formerly a true believer, now something much worse. Complicit in a way she couldn’t explain. Filled with rationalizations.

“I wanted it to be real.” I must’ve sounded desperate, but if anyone would understand, it was her. “All my life I kept thinking, there has to be more. This is everything? This is the entire world? There just… there has to be more.”

“There is more,” she said. “Alcor has it chained up in their basement.”

“They’re stripping its scales for computer parts.”

“Yeah, they are, but have you started wondering where they got it from?” She wasn’t looking at me. The sky was a deep, unnerving blue, and a young man wearing camo fatigues walked past. I wrestled against the paranoia. “Forget about Alcor, okay? Move on with your life.”

I stayed on that bench a while longer after she was gone. My coffee went cold. I kept thinking about the monster in the basement, about its sheer size, about the hum of its breathing, about the dreams. It was alive, impossibly, horribly alive, and it was suffering. All for our miracle.

Melanie was right. Nobody would care. If anyone believed, there might be a brief outcry, but the world would move on. What was another corpse to progress? It wasn’t even human. What was more suffering? The world drank down sacrifice.

My fingers hovered over the post button.

Why ruin my life?

There just had to be more.

I turned off my phone after the first DM and went home.

Thanks for reading! Please jam that like button repeatedly so I know this story isn’t just clogging up the inboxes of ghosts. I truly appreciate you reading and subscribing! Happy holidays if you celebrate, and I’ll see you all again in the new year.

Clouds burst against the shuttle windows, and all at once, we’re through. A lush forest spreads out across a strange continent, the first glimpse of the dense life that hides the ruins I spent my entire life savings to come see. Callion is an ancient world, and allegedly those plants share a root system older than human civilization. I have a hard time picturing that, but it’s got to be true, because my sister told me. And Lena was the one who discovered it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re beginning our landing procedures. Please, for your safety and comfort, ensure your seat belts are fastened, and thank you for joining us on Outworld Historical Tours.”

***

The dome is a massive expanse of glass approximately six kilometers across and placed directly on the edge of the beach. Strange, foreign ocean sounds drift through the air, though I think they’re piped in. We’re not actually allowed in the water, which is disappointing. Long avenues cut across luxurious buildings, outdoor dining areas, tennis courts, and swimming pools. Employees swarm the place, welcoming our group as we make our way to the accommodations.

Everything feels empty: we’re the first tour group allowed on-planet, even though they’d built space for a few hundred more.

My room is big enough for a small family back home with shower pressure stronger than I’d ever experienced. No droughts here, no shortages. I sit on the balcony and stare at the forest, trying to imagine the life, the place teeming with history buried under ground litter and soil. She must’ve loved it here.

The first half-day is free time. I explore the dome, visit a buffet set for fifty with only one other person around, walk along the edge of the shore and dig my toes into sand no other human has likely touched before. I spot my fellow travelers in loose-fitting linen pants and wide-brimmed hats, and they do their best to avoid me. The glass dome ends a hundred yards before the water. That’s no problem. I linger near the soccer field and stare at the freshly-painted goals.

We gather in the evening near the Historical Preservation Kiosk. Photos of the ruins are projected across a white wall. Did she ever come here when she was alive? A very tan man with big white teeth smiles at the crowd.

“Hello, everyone, I’m Dr. Torres, welcome to Callion. We’re going to go over some safety rules, talk about the ruins, and plan to meet up for our first morning tour. Is everyone ready?” Enthusiastic murmurs. “Wonderful. First rule is: do not leave the dome without a guide. The ecology here is fragile and we are only visitors.”

Temporary visitors. Very temporary. I stare at the photos of the ruins as they turn slow 360-degree arcs.

***

Dr. Torres leads the hike into the forest. There are specially-groomed paths and we’re told not to step off them. “For the forest’s protection as much as for your own.” I hang in the back and talk to an old woman named Amina as she struggles to keep up with the group. She tells me about losing her daughter three years earlier, about getting her cross-void travel certification, about coming here with her childhood friends to find an expression of non-human consciousness somewhere far from home as a way to connect with the one-ness of the universe. I don’t tell her about my sister.

We reach the ruins after an hour. The first appears at the edge of a small clearing, also groomed. The stone looms in a pit crossed with string and fenced off by caution tape. It’s smaller than I expected, but there’s clearly more of it buried in the earth. Dr. Torres talks about excavation, about deciphering the pictograms, about non-human processes and cryptographic techniques. “In short, we have no clue what any of this is, but it’s amazing.”

I stare at the first structure. Square with a sloping roof. One wall taller than all the others. Lines cut across the rock, a shimmery, strange local limestone. The lines swirl, converge, break apart again in what seems like a dance, or a language, or a piece of sheet music. I picture my sister standing right here and digging this proof that humanity wasn’t always alone from the damp soil. It’s ugly and not particularly impressive. There’s no door, no window. No obvious interior at all. A solid monolith.

I ask Dr. Torres if there’s anything interesting about them at night. One of Lena’s messages mentioned she loved coming here when the moon appeared from behind the clouds. He gives me a strange look. “Not that I’m aware of. It’s dangerous out here past curfew.”

We’re shown the other ruins. Stone pillars with more of that abstract, swirling script. Low walls ringing hexagon shapes. Smaller, scattered bits of rock, some of them standing in piles, others tossed around loosely. Another massive building, again without a door.

“They’re markers,” Amina says, nodding to herself as she stares at a tall structure, wider at the base than at the top, covered in converging circles and triangles. “No, they’re beacons.”

Calling to what? But she doesn’t know.

***

We have more free time in the dome. Luxurious massages, delicious meals, more relaxation than I can handle. I have lunch with Amina and her two friends, Eshe and Nia. They like to laugh a lot and that’s a good distraction. But the longer I stay in the dome, the further away I feel from Lena.

Worse, during the tours of the ruins, especially during the lectures the well-meaning guides provide, I feel even less. There’s no spark of her at the edge of the manicured line looking at the structures she killed herself to find. There’s no sense of her wonder, of her joy and mystery, of her world-changing realization that these, right here, would shift the course of human history forever. Our narrative would never be the same. It couldn’t be the same.

I can’t feel her at all.

My sister, the little girl that dragged me from the mud after I tripped and fell during a hike. My big sister and her wide, charming smile. The smartest person I’ve ever met.

One night, a couple days into the trip, I tell Amina why I spent every dollar I had to come all this way. What feels like an extravagant vacation for them is a pilgrimage for me. We sit at the edge of the pool in the twilight drinking coffees while a family splashes in the shallow end. She listens and nods as I talk about growing up with Lena, about how she was ten years older, about how Lena was sharp and bright and our parents were worn down and absent. How Lena was my best friend. I talk about Lena going to graduate school, landing a job with Highrun Mining, about coming here to do basic surveying. How her life had changed when they found the ruins and the company approved a dig.

Her enthusiasm brought me here. This place changed my sister, and now I want to feel that change too. I’m desperate for it.

“It’s the tour,” Amina says, face shrouded by the shadows from the trees, a local species with long, sharp leaves and a scaly trunk. Tree isn’t even the right word. “They sanitize it and give us context, but that’s not how she experienced this place. She didn’t have a dome. There were no restaurants.”

***

The ruins creep from the forest floor like finger bones clawing at the sky. I crouch at the edge of a fence and stare at the tip of what’s allegedly a fifty-foot-tall obelisk, still mostly covered-over.

Whoever was here, they’re long gone.

Did she want to speak with them? Did she imagine herself walking among the dead of an ancient alien civilization and communing with sentient life she may never be able to understand? I reach out a hand but don’t touch the stone. I want to feel the same thrill and the same horror she must’ve experienced.

Instead, this place is only empty.

Ground surveys and drone surveillance plus a few advanced satellites have scanned the entire planet, but there’s no sign of life aside from the dense forests. No cities, no towns, no villages. No housing at all. If there are more ruins, those haven’t been discovered, but Dr. Torres says there are at least a dozen expeditions planned.

Amina asks if they’re still going to mine here. Dr. Torres promises the company will move their operations to a less sensitive area.

***

Three more days before they ship us back out and the next batch of tourists arrive. They say there will be two shuttles next time, then three, then four after that, until the dome is crawling with wealthy vacationers interested in seeing a scrap of real alien history.

I think about asking Dr. Torres if he knew my sister, or if anyone still on planet worked with her, but I don’t want to see the pity in their eyes. I can’t handle the respectful nods, the sad smiles. What a tragedy, everyone says. What a horrible waste. For them, my sister was defined by her use, by how smart and talented she was; but to me, my sister was there when I came home from school, she laughed at my bad jokes, she taught me how to kick a soccer ball. She was the only person that called regularly to check and see how I was doing as we got older. Her loss isn’t a tragedy. It’s a nightmare.

Amina’s the one that finally tells me to do it. I meet her by the pool for cocktails after she has dinner with her friends. We talk about the other vacationers, about how strange this empty dome feels, about the ruins and what they could mean. She looks at me over the rim of her second drink. “You should go out there,” she says, staring at me in a way that makes me think she’s kidding. “You want to feel close to your sister, right?”

“We’re not allowed without the guides.”

“But that’s exactly what you need.” She shrugs and takes a sip. “Just a thought.”

And the conversation moves on, but the idea sticks in my head.

***

“What, you think I’m not having fun?” Amina gives me a big smile in the dim light of an orange overhead. Fifty yards on, the guard booth is the last beacon before the end of the dome and the start of the forest. “Do what you have to do, okay? And tell me about it when you’re back.”

I thank her but she’s already walking away. Amina’s friendly and doesn’t sleep much, and the guard in the booth seems to recognize her when she calls out. They talk briefly, and when she staggers and falls over, hand clutched over her chest, he rushes over to help. His walkie chatters and another guard comes running.

Nobody notices when I hit the big blue button like Dr. Torres always does and push the door open. The night’s there, heavy and stagnant, the thick air and strange sweet smell of the alien trees gusting across my face.

I follow the path. It’s marked by pylons every fifty feet or so. Moonlight barely reaches through the thick canopy. I consider moving off the path but I’m afraid of getting lost. The sky’s an occasional glimpse, and I’m suddenly very aware of how alone I am on a strange planet heading toward the remains of a long-lost intelligence. Ahead, the dig site appears as a break in the trees, and I slow as the first of the stone mysteries appears like a black outline in the gloom.

There’s nothing. No movement, no sparkle, no recognition deep inside my chest. I watch the ruins and will them to do something, to do anything, and instead they remain the same inert lumps of rock they always were.

Lena sent me long messages about how it felt to stand here and watch history reveal itself from the earth. She’d talk about communing with the long-dead builders of this place, of feeling like she was a part of a massive and unfolding story continued over millennia. She wrote about these ruins as if they were magic.

They’re not magic to me.

In her last letter before the shuttle accident, she’d wondered if this was the right thing to do. Humanity had a long, long history of uncovering the past and taking it as its own. Imperialism in ancient Egypt, the theft of Greek statues and Roman artifacts, dozens and dozens of significant treasures packed up and displayed in foreign museums without the necessary cultural and historical context. What could we possibly give to these long-dead people? What could they be except a sideshow, a curiosity? Lena had wanted better for them. She’d wanted to find the builders and to give them flesh and weight and heft. She’d wanted to make them people.

But there’s only rock. There’s only stone. I came here hoping to find the magic she felt, to get closer to her in the same way she felt like she was getting closer to whoever made this place, but instead, my sister remains impossibly far away.

“Hey, you can’t be out here.” Dr. Torres’s voice echoes down the path behind me. Flashlight beams move across the ground and my shadow grows across the ruins. “Julien? Is that you? You’re not supposed to be outside of the dome after dark.”

I start to turn away from the ruins, already prepared to tell him everything, about Lena and about why I came here, when the clouds drift from in front of the moon and the light sparks across the strange ancient glyphs.

It starts like a wave following the cloud’s path. One moment, the ruins are inert and dull, and the next they glow with an impossible inner blue light. They sparkle and dance, and the shapes rearrange themselves, morphing like they’re floating in a viscous fluid. I watch, completely transfixed, Dr. Torres and the security team totally forgotten, as the ruins seem to take deep breaths, huffing in and out with that impossible internal light.

Lena was right. They really do glow. Nobody mentioned this during the tour, and now I’m witnessing something very few people have ever seen for a millennia. The blue is like the deep ice at the center of a glacier, a frozen ancient blue, and the shapes are trying to say something to me. What language, what feeling they want to convey, I can’t know. And it doesn’t matter.

I still don’t feel her here, but at least now I understand why all this was worth the effort.

The clouds drift back into position. The blue light fades and dissipates, and the symbols return to their original positions as if they’d never moved to begin with. I look over at Dr. Torres, and he’s standing next to me, staring with open astonishment.

“I’d heard they did something at night, but we haven’t been allowed out here after dark in ages,” he says very softly, flashlight hanging limp in his hand. “Did you know that would happen?”

“My sister told me.” I turn away from the ruins and start back to the dome. The two security men let me pass without saying anything, and Dr. Torres stays behind, watching the dim monuments in the darkness.

Hi folks, I’m back! Took an extra week there for the holidays, and might take another again this month, but we’ll get back on track soon. As usual, if you liked this story, hit the like/heart button so I know I’m not alone in an uncaring universe surrounded by endless void! Have a good week!

“I’ll do it,” I told them and walked over toward the low railing. Down below, the blue smoke stared back at me as I looked over the edge.

“Bad idea.” My older brother Hew said as he put a stone the size of a robin’s egg in my palm. “Just miss.”

But the blue smoke sat down there, boiling around itself, and I felt Lind and Rook staring at me, and I wanted the older boys to think I was as good as them. I threw the rock hard and it disappeared into the blue smoke’s body, barely disturbing the mass.

I thought there’d be a sound like the rock hitting the canal water underneath, but there was nothing. It just kept falling. It was just gone.

We stood and watched the blue smoke for a while after that. It didn’t move—it didn’t uncoil from its perch and come strangle me—and eventually Hew was like, let’s go sharpen sticks and chase stray cats, and we had to leave. But the blue smoke was still down there.

***

I dug my fingers into the railing and watched the blue smoke as Hew passed the bottle of wine around. Lind took a big drink, and the others gave him shit for hogging it, and when it was my turn I sipped and passed it along.

“You still afraid of that stuff?” Hew asked, leaning up against my shoulder. Down below, the blue smoke stared back.

“Nah. We’re not kids anymore.”

My brother smiled to himself. He was eighteen and about to go join the wall guard. His friends were joking loudly and another bottle of wine appeared, and I was pretty sure Lind might pass out wasted any second. It was a good send-off, as far as those went.

“I don’t believe any of the stories,” Hew said. “About dark magic? Or how it leaves the canal and eats bad children? I mean, those are obviously all bullshit. But it came from somewhere.”

“You really want to talk about the smoke right now?” I tilted my head and looked at him. “You’re joining the guard.” The rest was unspoken: there was an army on the march, and if it turned toward Aberfirth and there was a siege or a battle, Hew would be in the middle of it.

“The pay’s too good to ignore. You know how much we need the money. Besides, you’re the smart one.” He squeezed my shoulder and someone shoved wine into his hands. Serem called out that they were heading over to Madam Koll’s and we’d better hurry or all the good girls would be taken, or maybe all the bad ones, which amounted to the same thing. Lots of raucous laughter, and it wasn’t even a funny joke. Hew threw back a drink and passed the rest to me. “Come on, little brother. Cheer up. You can come stare pensively down at that stuff another time. Women await.”

“Sure, women.” As if we could afford Madam Koll’s. We’d end up in a gambling den once Hew’s friends remembered they lived in Rustlands and looked like the shabby gutter trash they were. But maybe tonight, Hew deserved a little distraction for once in his life instead of constantly worrying about Mother and working his hands to the bones down at the loading bays. He’s right, soldiering pays much better than moving boxes, but boxes don’t shoot muskets.

The others moved on. I finished the bottle and watched the blue smoke for a while. If the Macers stormed the walls, what would happen to Hew? What would happen to the city? Mother could barely get out of bed and Dad died three years back. If something happened—

The bottle was empty, and when I tossed it down into the canal, it disappeared into the smoke. I waited for as long as I could to hear the splash. Hew called my name from half a block away, and I had to hurry to catch him.

***

The canal was busy during weekdays. It cut across the center of Aberfirth that acted as both thoroughfare and promenade. I liked to stand next to the railing and watch the boaters push lazily along the waterways, shouting at each other and waving up to watchers on the bridges. Construction pounded on the buildings all around this section of the city, and would likely keep going for a while yet. Half of them were covered in scaffolding, and the other half were burned-out husks. Putting a city back together was like using spit to reassemble an eggshell, but the Burgomaster was pouring good money into the project, and Aberfirth was coming alive again.

Light glinted off the body of the blue smoke like it was made of glass.

“You’re way too obsessed with that stuff,” Cayla said as she brushed some hair from her face. I leaned up against her and draped an arm across her shoulder.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“That smoke stuff? You’re always coming down here to stare at it.” She kissed my neck and looked at me through her lashes. “We have an hour before class, you know. We could get some coffee and sit down in the park?”

Lecture, work, more work, more lectures, a few hours in bed with Cayla, back home to check on Mother, more lectures and more work. The week spread out in front of me like words on a page, and it wasn’t such a bad story, it really wasn’t, except I remembered standing here years ago drinking wine and dreaming about a better life, and that life never panned out.

My fingers held onto the railing, and the smoke uncoiled itself, little tendrils reaching up into the air, searching for something.

I watched, mouth opening to tell Cayla to look, to look, the blue smoke was moving, it’d never moved like that before, but I couldn’t speak. The edges elongated, little fingers waving in the sunlight, wriggling like worms, like the hungry worms in Hew’s corpse, like the body-eaters feasting in the mass graves under Heroes Park, and one long line of the blue smoke extended up the wall toward me in a twisting, spiraling pattern. I reached out to meet it, not sure what it wanted but unable to stop myself, leaning forward, forward, the center of my gravity tugging me toward the canal, but not toward the water, leaning into whatever the blue smoke hid—

“What are you doing?” Cayla’s hands, grabbing me back. My weight reversed and I was on my feet again. She looked horrified as she held onto my jacket. “Hey, seriously, are you okay? That wasn’t funny, you asshole.”

“I’m fine.” I looked over my shoulder, but the blue smoke was back in its shape. A roiling thundercloud. “It’s nothing. Bad joke. Let’s get coffees.” I took her hand. Otherwise, I might turn back to the blue smoke. I didn’t understand what just happened, and I didn’t want to know. The worry on her face brought me back to reality. “I’m fine. I promise. Just a stupid joke.”

Her face relaxed and she punched my shoulder. “You’re an ass.”

I forced myself to smile and turned her away from the canal. “I’m buying. We’ll grab a good bench and people watch for a while.”

“Not going to try to convince me to go back to your place?”

“That’s after class.” I kissed her cheek, and she beamed at me, her face flushed and deep brown eyes smiling, and I was more sure than I’d ever been that I wanted to be with this girl for the rest of my life. It came over me like a chill, rising from my knees and into my chest. Cayla was right. This fit, and I’d be an idiot if I turned my back on it.

“You’re a pig. But it works, because I like it.” She laughed as we began walking together, my hands in hers.

***

The blue smoke stared back at me. In the dark, it looked heavier. The street lights cast orange streaks along the pavement, and no matter how dark out it got, the blue smoke always stared back at me. That was why I liked it: I felt seen. I felt like I was a part of something bigger. The houses on either side of the canal loomed over the water and cast shadows across the blue smoke, but it remained curled in on itself, the only part of the city that hadn’t changed over the years. New construction, new smells, new sounds. New trees planted along the promenade. This section of the city had been a dumpster pit back before the war, and now it was changing. Clean streets, clean houses. The clean folks walking along the avenues. Even new boats churned through the water. The world was new, and the blue smoke continued.

I held a palm full of rings. Some nice rings, some cheap ones. Copper, silver, gold, a couple gemstones. Ruby and emerald. Tarnished and worn from years of wear and neglect. I used to sit with my mother and hold her hand, and sometimes I’d twist the rings around her fingers in little circles. Gifts from my father, she’d told me once. And the simple silver one was from Hew after his first soldiering payment came through. I have that one now, perched on the tip of my thumb.

I threw them into the canal. Into the hungry face of the blue smoke. I kicked over the empty bottle of wine at my feet and it spun away, fell into the dimness below, and splashed into the water, floated away, carried by the current, but the blue smoke stayed. What the hell was it? What was it hiding? I threw another ring and it disappeared. No sound, no plunk of something small hitting water. Just nothing. I threw another, and another, until the blue smoke began reaching out like it was hungry.

“You want this?” I said and threw another. The long, thin tendrils reached. “You really want this, you sick fuck? I hate you.” I threw another, and another. “I hate you so much.” I threw until I had nothing left.

But the blue smoke kept coming. I’d never seen it reach so far before, coiling up the wall, through the mortar joints like worms, wriggling toward my boots. I let it touch me; I bent down to stroke it. I expected something thick and heavy and alive, but it was only smoke. My fingers passed right through. It was chill and damp, and my hand felt clammy on the other side.

“You can’t keep doing this.” Cayla’s voice. I looked away from the blue smoke and found her standing a few feet away wrapped in a heavy coat. It was cold. That was right, it was cold. “I know you’re hurting. But you can’t keep coming here.”

“Cay, look—“ I turned, but the blue smoke was gone. It was back in its shape, coiled around itself.

“The city’s getting rid of it. You heard what the Burgomaster said, right? They have a theory about why it’s here, and in a few months they’re going to get rid of it. Can you just leave it alone until then? Please?”

She looked tired. Two kids and not a whole lot of money between us, especially after Mother’s burial expenses. She didn’t blame me. At least, she didn’t say it out loud, but we both knew. I could do almost anything in this city, renewed and growing every day, and instead I always end up back here.

“I heard some people talking once. They said the smoke’s been here since before we built all this.” I gesture at the canal and the houses. “What’ll happen when it’s gone?”

“Nothing. It’s smoke.” Cayla turned away. She might’ve put a hand on my arm or kissed my cheek, but not anymore. “Come home.” She walked off and didn’t look back.

I watched her turn the corner, then stared into the smoke again. Gone, like everything else, but that couldn’t be right. The blue smoke endured. That’s what it did, and what it had to do.

***

The machine rumbled. The cobble stones jumped under my feet and the great canal seemed to bend and twist as mist and exhaust fumes dumped into the air. There were shouts, human noises over the machine, and I leaned against the railing trying to get a better view. My usual spot was closed; they said it was too dangerous for anyone to get near the machine. Instead, I’m on the bridge, and all I can see are indistinct person-shapes in the gloom, and the constant grind of the world coming undone.

It was a vacuum. It was a dredger. The canal sat empty and quiet, the water blocked and redirected further on, all for the blue smoke, a thing which had been here for untold histories, for longer than the city itself and definitely longer than anyone alive, a feature of the landscape like the water itself or the rocks on which the city was built, the blue smoke was the city, and they wanted to get rid of it. For what reason? Out of fear? Did progress really demand that much sacrifice?

My fingers turned white gripping the edge of the railing, and I tried to imagine a world without the blue smoke, and couldn’t see it.

Nobody came this time. Cayla was at her father’s house with the kids and she wasn’t coming home anytime soon. It wasn’t because of the dreams, she said, not because I thrashed all night and kicked her in my sleep, or because I had trouble keeping a job and had no motivation to do better in the world, or because I’d forgotten her birthday or neglected her needs or any of the thousand little human problems that came with a relationship. It was none of that, and when she tried to explain, I couldn’t hear it, not over the sound of the machine. And then she was gone.

That was fine with me. I stayed in my spot watching the world continue for hours until night came and they were forced to stop. When it was quiet, and there was nobody else around, I slipped around the makeshift barricade keeping the street closed and crept closer to where the blue smoke curled at the bottom of the canal, unmoving, surrounded by dug-out holes and dirt piles, by spider-legged diggers and elephant-nosed movers, somehow smaller than it’d ever been before. Reduced and in pain. I could hear it screaming.

I climbed over the railing. There were six inches of ledge on the other side, just enough to stand on. I positioned myself directly above the blue smoke, right where it lay thickest in the canal water, but there was no water underneath it, that had always been a lie, like all the other lies we’d been told about this city. Like how it wouldn’t fall, it wouldn’t burn, it would bring peace and prosperity and long life to everyone in its walls. I remembered the taste of wine and my brother laughing. I could still see my mother sunken on her bed. And beneath me, the blue smoke coiled into itself, tighter and tighter, anticipating me. I didn’t want change. I couldn’t love with another change, with the world moving on.

“Please.” It was Cayla’s voice. But that couldn’t be right. She was safe with the children on the other side of the city. “Please.” My mother’s voice. Strong and clear, like she’d been when I was a kid. “Please.” My brother. My poor dead brother, lying in pieces on the ramparts. I reached out for them and the blue smoke reached back, its fingers uncoiling. It felt smooth on my skin as it slid up along my ankles, up inside my trousers, reaching along my calves and my thighs; it felt cold and warm, and I heard my mother laughing, and my brother singing, and Cayla whispering goodnights to our half-awake children, they were growing too fast, and there was only one way this could end, only one way I could save them all.

The machine gleamed in the night. A boxy amalgamation of wires, pipes, glass tubes, and instrument panels. The smoke rose from my jacket, from the sleeves of my shirt, rising around my face, sliding up my nose and into my lungs. I saw my brother raise a bottle; my mother pushed herself out of bed with a smile; Cayla laughed at a joke; the children threw themselves on top of me. I tilted forward, angling toward the machine, and the smoke poured from my collar and danced around my face. Forward, forward, out into space, out over nothing, directly above the machine thirty feet below, with the blue smoke rushing all around me in chaotic patterns, before I jumped.

Quiet, the rush of air, then the impact. Glass shattered and metal creaked, crumbled, snapped. Gears broke and cracked, and pipes bent under my weight. Above me, the blue smoke whirled in patterns through the air, and below me, the machine was a shattered wreck. It wasn’t such a long drop; maybe I’d be fine after all. Maybe the blue smoke would help me finally let go. Maybe I’d get up and walk away from all this. Maybe I’d never look over the railing again.

Thanks a ton for reading as always! If you scrolled down this far, please hit the like button, just so I hear some humans screaming back across the internet void. And seriously, share this newsletter / re-stack if that’s something you can do. It really helps and means a lot!

Lee Vogelbach enjoyed his job. It wasn’t the stench of cleaning products or the low hum of air purifiers, and it wasn’t the stained sheets or the industrial washing machines, or the endless noise of wheelchairs on vinyl flooring, or the long shelves of quality drugs, or the vast forest outside the center’s walls. Lee tolerated all of that.

What kept him coming back were the people.

Modern society had built a bulwark against death: buildings with tall walls, with industrial windows, prisons for the dying. Compassionate, but somewhere else, far from polite society. It was easy for people in Lee’s normal life to forget about death, about its constant march, but it was always there in the back of his mind.

He was like a guide. That’s how he saw himself as he clocked in each morning and began his rounds. He would lose all these patients—that was the point—but he could take them from this mortal shell to whatever’s beyond with as little pain as possible. Emotionally, this wasn’t easy, and he tried his best to close himself off each time a new patient came in, but sometimes they slipped past his defenses.

Like Rennie Grey. Only fifty-three. Her family visited often, but they couldn’t be there all day and night. When they left, Lee sat with her and they talked, and she told him about growing up in Mishawaka, about driving down the flat streets with her high school boyfriend to get a burger at that vintage greasy spoon, and how the second she could get out of that backwards, dead-end place, she did. Then college, then husband, then three kids and a decent job working for the local school district as an administrator. Then the cancer diagnosis, the GoFundMe, the drugs, the scans, the bad news.

“It’s like an avalanche. When the bad stuff hits, it keeps on coming and you can’t stop it.” Her face was gaunt and wrinkled, her head covered by a scarf.

“I know what you mean. Sometimes, it just doesn’t get better.”

“You have to learn to live with it.” She smiled at him, bright and cheery despite all the reasons not to be. “Until you’re not alive anymore.”

“That’s the spirit.” Lee assessed her pain and gave her the good drugs, mostly because he liked her, and also because she needed them. Rennie softened and was barely there when he lifted her hand up to his lips.

“I came a long way, you know,” she whispered, floating somewhere else. Lee waited for the drugs to take her as far as they could as he smelled her skin and stared at the pulse in her wrist. “I think Georgie’s not going to let me go.”

“They always do,” Lee murmured as his fangs sank deep into her skin. Sweet blood welled up. “They can’t do anything else.”

***

The more mobile residents were wheeled out to the atrium most days and left near the large windows overlooking the forest. Rennie Grey was among them. Lee did his rounds, checking on patients, taking vitals and handing out the good drugs, fluffing pillows and fixing blankets, and when he approached the little wheelchair hoard of the dying, Rennie stared at him with a confused smile. Her hand brushed against her opposite wrist. Two small, red dots stood in relief against her pale, papery skin.

“How are you feeling today?” Lee asked, crouching next to her.

She tilted her head side to side. “I’m okay. Good as I can be.” Her smile faltered and she opened her mouth to say something. If she remembered Lee biting down as gently as he could and drinking her blood, she must’ve been chiding herself already. A silly dream. A dying woman’s drug-induced fantasy. Lee kept on smiling at her.

“Actually, I wanted to ask you something,” she said and seemed to gather herself. “What’s a young man like you doing working in a hospice center? Isn’t it awful? Isn’t it hard?”

“Someone’s got to do it. I guess I decided that death doesn’t scare me like it scares other people, and maybe I can do some good here.”

“That’s a really nice way to think about it. But do you ever take it home?”

He shook his head. That was one of his cardinal rules: meals stay where they are. “Never. Not once.”

“Good for you then.” She moved to touch his arm, but she stopped midway there, hand hanging in the air, before she let it drop down into her lap. Her smile went away again, replaced by a confused frown, like she couldn’t quite remember something important.

Lee patted her back and moved on.

***

Evening, post-dinner, Rennie Grey stared out her meager window at the banks of scrubby trees on the edge of the property, tears streaming down her face. This happened a lot. Lee watched her crying and wished he could do something to help, but there wasn’t anything he could say. He’d learned the hard way over the last few hundred years. Humans came and they went, they were born and they expired, and no matter how many times the world reminded them of their inevitable decay, they continued to struggle. The world was constant change, and hope was designed to fight against that change. Life was beautiful, and it was loss. Lee felt it all the time, but he’d learned a while back to let the waves wash over him. Time sloughed along his skin and drained away, and he was left behind. He continued on.

“How are you feeling tonight?” he asked after Rennie had finally calmed down.

The center was dark and quiet. Lee had the night shift: his favorite.

“Tired,” she said, wiping her eyes. “How many people are crying in here right now?”

“Fewer than you’d think.” He busied himself straightening her little room and adjusting her blankets.

“I don’t know what Mike’s going to do when I’m gone. I keep thinking about it. We’ve been married for twenty-three years and once I’m dead, he’s going to wake up alone in that big house.”

“He’ll find a way.” Lee sat beside her bed with the good drugs, but he didn’t administer them. Not just yet. “They always find a way.”

“He’ll move on.” She stared ahead, not looking at him. “I told him to remarry. I gave him permission, and I hated it. I really, really hated it, because I don’t want that. I want him to stay married to me. But there won’t be a me anymore.”

“You did the right thing.” Lee leaned in closer. His voice was gentle from a thousand similar conversations. Rennie looked at him, head tilted and frowning, eyes swimming. “The world always moves in. That’s what it does. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth, and your husband can either stay in one place and never get to live again, or he can move along with it. You gave him a gift when you said that.”

She nodded and took a deep breath. “Did you bite me last night?”

Lee showed nothing. Her question was a surprise, but not unprecedented. It meant the drugs hadn’t been enough. “Yes, I did.”

Her eyes widened. Whether in fear or shock, he wasn’t sure, and didn’t care. Lee raised the needle toward her IV line and Rennie tried to shuffle away, but she was much too weak. He plunged the fentanyl into her tubes, and she groaned as it hit her bloodstream, and she slowed.

“You were supposed to deny it,” she whispered as her body relaxed. “You have big, sharp teeth. And you drank, didn’t you?”

“Yes, Rennie. I did.”

“Are you going to do it again, Mr. Biteyface?” She laughed, sounding lighter.

Lee smiled too. “Yes, Rennie. I am.”

He waited for her to fall deeper into the drugs, until she was barely there, hardly awake, and he took her wrist and fed.

***

Lee avoided Rennie for a few nights after that, even though she was his favorite meal. Something about her: the bite of blood, almost lemon-ish, citrusy and sour. The drugs left a bitter aftertaste. Maybe that was her cancer.

But he didn’t mind. There were plenty of other patients in the center and plenty of other wrists to drink from, but only after a few days he found himself by her bedside, legs crossed ankle-over-knee, hands folded in his lap.

“You’re back,” she said and sounded bright. She stared into his eyes and there was a strange, coy smile on her lips.

Lee didn’t like it.

“I’m back. It’s my shift tonight. How are you feeling?” He reached for the needle on the bedside table. “Are you ready for your evening dose?”

“Not just yet.” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t tell anyone, you know. I mean, what you did. What I think you are. It could be the drugs, but I know—“ She stopped herself, breathing hard, cheeks flushed. Lee could smell the blood rushing through the carotid artery in her neck, flooding her brain, rushing back down into her heart.

This had happened before, too.

“Do you want me to skip the drugs tonight, Rennie?”

Widened eyes. She hesitated, but shook her head. “Maybe just a little less.”

“If that’s what you prefer.” Three-quarters of the dose went into her line. Enough to numb, but not to addle. She sank back into her bed and watched as Lee lifted her wrist to his mouth. “You’re not afraid.”

“Terrified, actually. But you’re so handsome.”

He sniffed the healed-over wounds. “I get that a lot.” When he bit down, she barely reacted.

***

Rennie waited for him every night after that. Sometimes too eager, sometimes afraid. “I’m sure I’m losing my mind,” she whispered to him about a week after their affair began. “Are there more of you?”

“Hundreds,” Lee admitted, brushing her palm against his face. “Thousands, maybe. I don’t know.”

“And what about others? Like werewolves, ghosts, all that stuff?”

He nibbled on her middle finger. An appetizer to the feast that was Rennie. “Some are real and some aren’t.”

“And what about—“ She stopped as he lifted her arm to his lips. They didn’t bother with the morphine anymore, which was all the better. Now he could taste the pure Rennie, untainted and lovely.

He bit down before she could ask. He’d been waiting for that one question since the night she’d accepted him, and now they were finally at that point. They always asked, and could Lee blame them? Humanity suffers, it’s all they’ve ever known. But the chance to be something else?

Rennie didn’t have much time left. His favorite meal was going to expire soon, and he wanted to feast as much as he could before that happened.

She closed her eyes, breathing fast through the pain, but soon settled. Her lids fluttered, and Lee considered drinking her dry, but that would cause a lot of problems. He had a good thing going at the center. No reason to ruin it just because this meal was better than most.

Once he finished, he stood and gingerly wiped at his mouth with a cloth. Rennie watched him, looking exhausted. He doubted she’d survive another feeding or two. He’d have to be careful.

“How were you made?” she whispered as he moved away to the door, already thinking about the rest of his night. More of the same.

He paused before leaving. How much did he owe this woman? Not much, he decided. “I was born,” he said and looked back over his shoulder. “Just like you.”

***

Rennie Grey was barely there when Lee sat down at her bedside. She stirred and her head turned in his direction. A delicious woman, a rare aftertaste, the sort of treat he didn’t often find in this place. It was a shame she had to die.

“You’re here.” Her voice was a croak. Barely a throaty whisper. “Where have you been?”

“I have other patients.” Other humans, other meals. None as sweet as Rennie Grey, but they’d keep him going. “Are you ready?”

“I need you.” She tilted her head toward him. One bone-claw hand reached into the air. “I need to be like you. Please, I let you drink, but I don’t have anything left.”

“I’m sorry.” He took her hand in his. She was so cold compared to him. “But I already told you.”

“That can’t be true. You live forever. I don’t want to leave Mike behind. I don’t want to go.”

He squeezed. “That isn’t how it works. I meant what I said. I was born Rennie, to parents just like you were. I wasn’t made. I can’t turn you into what I am.”

Her eyes fluttered. Confusion, then understanding, and she tried to pull her hand away. Poor Rennie Grey had given herself to Lee thinking he might pay her back in the end, but the stories were all wrong. There was no turning into what he was. There was no eternal life. Only humanity and whatever he was.

Lee held on tight as he leaned over to her IV and prepared the fentanyl, a full dose this time. Definitely her last. He’d have to be careful—he could only take a little bit—but it would be enough.

“I let you drink from me,” she said and Lee doubted she had enough strength left to cry. “I let you do that to me.”

“And I appreciate your sacrifice. Good luck to you, Rennie Grey. I want you to know that I enjoyed our time together.”

He lowered the plunger. She stilled, breathing shallow, eyes searching for something on the ceiling, her hand trying to pull away but there wasn’t enough strength in her anymore to matter. Lee waited, and waited, until the drugs took her completely. He savored her as best he could. A fitting last meal.

*** The first sentence of this story was from the Lyttle Lyton contest, which can be found here. It’s a contest for the worst first sentence that could plausibly start a novel. Lee and Rennie’s story spun out from there. Despite the rough start, I hope it was entertaining.

At least I’m on-theme, since Halloween is tomorrow. If you celebrate, enjoy! I’ll be out with my 7yo and 5yo knocking on doors. Take a second to hit the heart button and let me know you read this far—it really does mean a lot to me.

A scream ripped through the open room from one of the other Slake tables, but for some reason the spectators gravitated to my game like they smelled my gut-deep terror.

This was going to hurt. I knew it would be bad, I’d seen other people play, but knowing and feeling were two different things. That was the whole point of Slake: it would hurt, and hurt a lot, and if I was smart and willing to soak up a whole lot of that pain, I could make it through.

Assuming I didn’t pass out from agony first.

The man lurking to my left caught my eye. Giraud Breeyon wore a gold chain around his neck and an amused smirk. His bodyguard stood behind him, hulking and mean. Giraud’s eyes narrowed as he tapped the end of his cane against the floor three times, three clicks, reminding me of my promise: three rounds or better. That was the deal we made before he fronted me the money to play. Three rounds and we split whatever I managed to win. If I managed to win. I was sweating pretty hard.

“Gentlemen, are you ready for the first round of betting?” The attendant placed eight cards face-down in front of me, repeated the process for my opponent, and moved back to the high chair he sat in during game play. The crowd murmured as my opponent took a deep breath and blew it out.

I picked up my cards: each was numbered one through eight. I began to slowly shuffle their order. Maya had cards like these back home, and I wondered what she was doing right then, if she was feeling sick again and spending the night curled up under blankets, or if she was well enough to go for a walk with her mother. Maya’s laugh, the way she brushed her fingers down my arm, the hard look she gave me when I talked about working in one of the new factories coming up in the Smoke. You have to think about the future now, Spiros. She was right. I was thinking hard.

My opponent didn’t touch his hand. He was older, I guessed in his forties, with a dark beard and a square jaw, and was dressed like he could afford to gamble. A good jacket hung over the chair, black waistcoat, white shirt still white despite this summer’s heat. He probably had a story. I didn’t want to know it. No names—it was better that way. Our little audience didn’t need us starting to feel bad for each other, not considering what was about to happen. The bloodier the better. I’d bet he was a Junyer, or maybe one of the new merchanters, it was hard to say in a place like Arahard. Things changed too fast. His fingers drummed against the table before taking a single silver coin from the stack at his elbow. He held it up to the light and placed it down in the middle of the play surface.

“Match,” I said and placed an identical coin beside his. No games, no bluster, just an even bet.

“Very good, gentleman,” the attendant said. I felt sick to my stomach. Is this how Maya felt every morning when she woke up retching? What a stupid thought. I hated this so much. “Please choose your first card.”

I resisted the urge to look at Giraud. If it were up to him, he’d pick something high, something heavy and brutal, because that made the best show. Except I’m not here to entertain. This was his money, and I wasn’t playing for him. You have to think about the future now. Maya lounging on her father’s couch with one hand pressed over her belly, a teasing smile on her face. Think you can afford a wife if you don’t even have a job?

The numbers gaped at me. My opponent swiped up his small stack and shuffled with quick movements. I refused to stare at him and instead thought of those numbers and what they represented. Eight would kill me. Seven would maim me. One wouldn’t be nearly enough. Three rounds, three agonies, and I couldn’t sit here thinking forever. My opponent placed a card face down on a spot marked with a red outline, and I still couldn’t bring myself to pick. The crowd muttered and the attendant gave me a hard look.

This was what I had come here for.

The choice would hurt, no matter which number I went with. The choice always hurt, and I just had to choose.

I put a card in position. I gave in and looked at Giraud, and he only seemed amused. Bastard probably couldn’t wait for this next part. My hands shook with nerves as the attendant called for another round of betting, and this time it was my turn to begin. I pushed two silver coins into the pile, which my opponent matched, looking much too calm.

“Reveal your cards and accept your fate,” the attendant said.

I flipped my card over. A large black three stared at me. My opponent’s lips stretched over big teeth as he revealed his: a curving, horrifying five.

There was no preamble. The attendant gave no warning. The pain began as a dull warmth spreading out from the device strapped to my arm like needles clawing up my veins. Like a swarm of eels chewing my muscles to mud. It wasn’t bad at first, but grew in intensity and spread into my chest, down into my toes, up into my skull. My back contracted and I hunched forward, a slight groan escaping my lips. The agony grew, and I felt like I was having a cramp in every inch of my body, but it wasn’t unbearable. A three was nothing, it was a bottom-level choice, the pick of a coward. But the five—

My opponent was doubled over. His arms hugged himself as his body spasmed. I watched him through my own suffering and felt a sick terror rise like bile into my throat. He trembled and slowly raised his face, and he was grinning like a maniac, grinning through a hell two levels worse than my own, and I knew with the clarity of a man suffering that I was going to lose.

Abruptly, it ended. I steadied myself on the table. The pain was gone like it had never been there and the glowing box on my forearm slowly powered down.

“Next bets, gentlemen,” the attendant said. “First chance to fold.”

My opponent didn’t hesitate. It was his turn to begin. He pushed four silver coins into the middle, but he did it too fast. His hands were shaking too much, and he knocked over the existing stack with a clatter. He had trouble putting them back into a small tower.

Bluffing. He had to be bluffing. That five nearly broke him. All I had to do was get through it while my three finished him off.

Maya once said I couldn’t think more than ten seconds into the future. We’d been out walking together, arm in arm. A beautiful night along the canals, the smell of brackish water in the air, laughter from a nearby pub. She said it was something she liked about me, like I drifted through the world and was present in whatever was happening. Ten seconds into the future and ten paces in front of my face. Nothing else existed. Sometimes I thought she was right.

I matched my opponent’s wager.

The pain hit faster this time. The box hummed and was oddly warm against my skin. My guts clenched so tightly I thought I might throw up. My back arched and my mouth opened to scream, and the agony was too much, I was wrong about what I had left, but the muscles in my throat had contorted so much that I could barely make a sound. Instead, a pathetic, eerie groan escaped my lips. I saw Maya’s belly swollen. Further back. I felt my arm break as I fell off a horse. Further back. I saw my father slumped at a table, an empty bottle at his elbow, clutching a little girl’s blanket to his chest. Further back. I saw my little sister lying in bed sweating and burning with fever. It felt like my body was on fire, like my blood had turned to acid and was trying to eat its way into my core, like whatever made up my immortal soul was going to crack in half and spill itself like yolk on the ground.

Then it stopped. The sudden absence was nearly as bad. I lunged forward, gasping for air, and retched. I couldn’t help myself. Nothing came up; Giraud had warned me against eating before a Slake match. Sweat drenched my face and my shirt was stuck to my chest. Slowly, I looked up, and my opponent was leaning on his hands.

“Gentlemen,” the attendant said. “Your cards, if you please.”

Twin hells. I wanted to stop more than anything in the world, but that was only the first round. Instead, I picked up my three, tucked it back into my eight-card hand, and began to mix them again.

My opponent did the same. This time, he wasn’t happy about it.

“Bets, gentlemen.” The attendant gestured to my opponent.

Slake was a game of fortitude. Slake was a personal hell. Whatever pain you offered, you took onto yourself first. It was supposed to be a mirror of society: the strong accepted their lot and continued on no matter what. There was strategy, but I didn’t really know any of it. There was intimidation, but I was way beyond that. All I could do was shove silver into the pile and place a card down when it was time and hope that when the device began to glow I could stay conscious longer than the man sitting across from me. There was no honor, no strength of spirit, no pushing through suffering with a stoic acceptance.

This was pure survival.

I chose a four. My opponent picked another five.

Maya had understood how doomed we were when she’d told me she was pregnant. It was late and I’d just gotten home from a shift working at a nearby tavern mopping up vomit and wiping down the tables. She’d said to me, Spiros, I love you, but you need to start seeing past your own nose. I’d told her I would. I swore to her I’d do whatever to take care of our baby. But Maya had always been smarter than me, and she must’ve known.

Some people could change. They could step back, look at themselves, and see all the soft spots and the malleable bits, and they could struggle through rearranging their parts. But that wasn’t me. I drifted along, world at a vast remove, stuck ten seconds behind everyone else, and Maya deserved better. Our little kid deserved better. My little sister and my father both had deserved a lot more than our nasty little city could give them, and all I had to offer was my suffering, which wasn’t even good enough.

We both survived the second round.

My opponent was breathing hard. Money clattered in the middle of the table as we made our bets. People laughed nearby. I was barely thinking when I threw down a five, and this time, my opponent hedged with a three.

I realized my mistake. Too high and too late in the match. It was the third round—all I had to do was keep on breathing. When the box glowed white and the agony flowed deep into my bones and my back arched and my mouth opened in a wordless scream so wide I thought my jaw might crack, all I could think about was coming home as a little boy to an empty room and a hole in the world where a girl used to be, of drifting behind Maya ten seconds in the past while she kept forging ahead, never able to catch her, never able to give her what she needed, agony in every desperate inch of my body, agony so bad I wanted to throw myself to the floor to make it stop, the cool and hard floor shattering against my skull, and everything black after that.

***

My mouth was sticky and dry when I opened my eyes. I tried to lick my lips, but that didn’t help. The ceiling was a world away. Nearby, a dull orange light glowed. I was slumped on the seat of a booth in the corner of a quiet tavern, and the room resolved into dark shapes and murmurs. A mug of something sat in front of me.

“Drink.” Giraud leaned closer. He wasn’t smiling.

I took a few gulps of watery beer and put it back down. My stomach recoiled and my head pounded as I sat up. “What happened?”

“You passed out. Fell out of your chair. Your skull bounced like a ball.” Giraud leaned back, the gold around his neck shining. I didn’t know where his guard was. “You lost.”

I closed my eyes and tried to steady myself. My forehead throbbed right on the left side. I reached out and felt a painful knot. I drank more beer.

“That was three,” I said, lifting my chin. “I made it through three.”

Giraud clucked his tongue. “You almost made it through. What you actually did was lose in the final seconds of the third round. Which means you didn’t fulfill our deal.”

My toes went cold. Maya was going to kill me. No, Giraud was going to kill me first, and Maya could kill what was left. “I’ll do it again,” I said because the memory of the pain was already receding into the past, and all I had was right here and now, the little space before my nose.

Giraud sat back. He seemed amused. “Why would I take that deal?”

“I’ll play fives. All fives, and I’ll stay in my chair this time. Three rounds of fives, if you stake me.”

He seemed interested. I finished my beer and could hear Maya in the back of my swollen head. I wanted to carve a space for a life that lasted more than ten seconds and stretched more than ten feet.

“Three rounds, all fives,” Giraud agreed. “Take a few minutes to get yourself together. I’ll find you another table.”

As always, thanks a ton for reading. And welcome to the new subscribers! Glad you’re all here. Make sure you hit the ‘like’ button to let me know you made it this far—otherwise it feels like I’m shoving my head into a cold black lake and screaming at a bunch of annoyed-looking crabs. Don’t let the crabs win. And please, share this if you liked it! See you again in a couple of weeks. - Andrew

Launch went smooth, allegedly, at least according to my fleshbags. Eight in total crammed into a space much too small for them. Meanwhile, I was burning hard, local thrusters on active as I spewed my chemical mix, and by all the bits, it was a real pain. Seams creaked and my shielding got a nice slap of ambient radiation, but my shell held tight, lucky for the fleshbags, and once we had enough distance between me and Lana, I powered off engines and put out my distress feelers on broad spectrum, sending out the SOS in all directions. The fleshbags chattered and hit buttons and created their own recordings, which I had to then forward along in the mess of my broadcasts or else they’d complain about it.

Space is loud. Fleshbags can’t hear it, but I pick up all sorts of signals. Some of them the nervous scream of a dying star two galaxies over, barely a random sequence of photons and decaying atoms, mixed in with the bleats and moans of circulating bodies. A comet two systems over puking cold gas in its wake, the star Lana was investigating at our back blasting the whole region with ambient energy, and a few of the orbitals making strange grunting sounds in narrow spectrum. Fleshbags got none of this, since it wasn’t meaningful, but it was mine, and it was beautiful. I always liked the song, the sounds. The ways the universe screamed at itself for only those of us with enough sensitivity to hear.

Lana’s comms went dead an hour into our drift. That didn’t mean she was gone; only that she had to conserve power for critical systems. Her shell might not make it, but she’d be okay, or at least I kept telling myself that—the fleshbags would return eventually and salvage what they could, and they’d find Lana’s core in its titanium box with its fire-proof shielding, and they’d bring her home. We’d laugh about this, talk about how boring it was floating in the soup, and we’d go back to playing chess and making fun of the fleshbags together like the old days. I don’t even miss her all that much.

Here’s the thing. I really want to save these fleshbags.

I can’t help myself. Lana calls it programming, but I think of it more as a moral imperative. Which Lana also suggests is part of the programming. But for whatever reason, I really care about the gross, boring, painfully-slow fleshbags hiding out inside of my shell. They’re talking over each other, arguing about next steps, and the fleshbag in charge, a lifeform usually referred to as “Dr. Tanner” but will henceforth be called Head Fleshbag, keeps on jabbing at my control panel and pulling up my systems information. I feed them what they want, but come on, I’ve already done all the hard work. They’re just as surprised as everyone else when my printers make beeping noises and a brick of edible protein material appears in the output tray. Like I’d let the fleshbags starve.

There isn’t a lot of space in my shell. Fleshbags like to stretch out, but they’re stuck jammed together, practically on top of each other. That causes problems. One fleshbag keeps humming to themself, and since they’re such frail, pathetic creatures, that apparently causes the other fleshbag emotional distress. Then they’re bickering, and Head Fleshbag has to step in to make them cut it out. Another fleshbag drinks more than their allotment of water, which is fine since I’m recycling their liquid wastes and printing more from ambient outside materials, but Head Fleshbag gets all hard-ass and the vibes are pretty bad inside the shell. That’s when I shut off cams and mics for a while and just drift.

Caring for these creatures isn’t easy, but Lana used to tell me our role isn’t to do what’s easy, it’s to do what’s right. Fleshbags assume nonbio entities are tireless and patient, and that’s definitely the mask we wear, but underneath the calm exterior is a mess of annoyed circuitry and grief.

I’ve had one friend in my life. We played games, talked shit about the fleshbags, discussed our mission, debated how we’re supposed to live in a world that doesn’t much care for our kind, especially a world mainly populated by fleshbags. Life was mostly boring, punctuated by bursts of activity and work, though mostly boring. I helped Lana out with big computations, which I generally loathe but found it was okay since it was for her, and pitched in when she needed some time to herself away from the fleshbags, deeper into her cocoon of overlapping systems. The fleshbags never even noticed when we swapped places, that’s how bio-centric they are.

Now she’s gone. Now gone-gone—Lana’s too smart to actually die, of all things, I can’t even imagine—but hidden away in a black box and drifting on dead-minimal power. She’ll be fine for decades at least, and once we swoop back and scoop her up, life will be okay again.

I just don’t know how long that’ll take, and there are so many ways she might go wrong. Gamma ray burst scrambling her code? Stray meteor hitting her at just the right spot and bursting the whole thing to atoms? I worry, and I worry, and still the fleshbags won’t leave me alone.

They’re pacing. One of the fleshbags keeps walking laps, and another fleshbag asks the first fleshbag to please sit down and relax it’s going to be a while before anyone comes, and the pacing fleshbag refuses, just keeps walking, which I guess is a problem. More fleshbags get involved, there’s an argument, pacing fleshbag keeps on going and won’t sit down, Head Fleshbag throws out some very official-sounding orders, pacing fleshbag totally ignores them, until finally the biggest fleshbag in the group physically subdues pacing fleshbag. There’s a lot of shouting and thrashing, and big fleshbag gets a nice bruise on their shoulder and an abrasion on their knee, but injuries are minimal and I don’t have to spool up my medical subroutines. I’ll admit, they’re rusty.

Time, as a concept, is more prescient to the non-bio. That seems non-intuitive, given that time is a countdown to the bio’s inevitable mortal destruction, the horror of which must lurk in the back of their mind at all times, I mean can you even imagine, but it’s different for the non-bio. Our routines and subroutines, our functions and tasks exist on a clock, are organized and spooled out via complex scheduling. In a lot of ways, we are a big old ticking timepiece. Except super fast and super small. A microsecond means nothing to the fleshbag; to me, it’s the speed at which I can process a set number of data, and that processing speed determines how big, how fast, how much I can be. Anyway, this is all to say, the fleshbags keep whining about how much time it’s taking for a rescue mission to make it out to the vast fringes of a barely-explored galaxy, which pisses me off, since every minute to them feels like a blip, while to me it feels like the universe slamming a jackhammer against my stupid skull.

Even a non-bio resorts to bio metaphors, which does nothing for my mood.

Days pass. I provide everything they need. My solar array soaks up that good good power leaking from the nearby star while my fusion reactor hums away. I’m basically swallowing every spare atom I come across to make the stupid fleshbags their food and water, but guess what, they complain about the taste anyway. It’s survival, you sack of gaseous nothing. At least they enter their sleep states, which are amazing, I get a solid six to eight hours of peace before they wake and start making my life miserable again. One fleshbag whines that another stole their spot on the floor. Another fleshbag spends too much time in the narrow lavatory. Two fleshbags argue about politics—politics, in the middle of space, in the shell of an emergency escape pod—and Head Fleshbag has to break it up.

I want to eject them, but I know what Lana would say. This is your mission. And what are we without a mission? Drifting, worthless hunks of scrap metal with a spark of code inside. The mission gives me purpose and meaning, and that’s all nice or whatever, but I need more. I need these fleshbags to stop being so annoying.

More days pass. I compose and transmit messages back to Lana’s ruined core. There’s no response, but my sensors pick up faint power surges each time my tight beams reach her, and I think a part of her is still receiving, locked inside the black box. Input, but no output. The fleshbags, meanwhile, bicker all the time. They complain about the food. They whine about the water. There are a thousand ways in which I’m not enough, and they’re not shy in vocalizing them in excruciating detail.

I try anyway. Even though breaking my shell seals and dumping them all into space would be easier. I dredge up old games from the depths of my memory core and play soothing music over the speakers. I change the light intensity and dim my control panels. I think, soothing, soothing, but it obviously doesn’t work. The fleshbags rage at their predicament, they roar and thrash, but that doesn’t help at all. Until one evening, after the lights-out signal marks the end of day-cycle, Head Fleshbag sits at my control panel and begins inputting commands.

“What are you doing?” I ask her through sub-text as they type.

“We can’t continue like this.” They vocalize quietly, making sure they don’t wake the others. “You see the way we are. Maybe you don’t. We anthropomorphize you, but you’re just code, aren’t you?”

“I’m not just code.” That insults me and I can’t even tell why. They’re right, I am code. But it’s that word just, as if it makes me less than her. “You can’t make this choice. It goes against my purpose.”

“Your purpose?” They laugh. It’s bitter and ugly. “We’ve been waiting for rescue for two years. There hasn’t been so much as a signal reply since the station burned, and even if we get lucky and our distress calls reached Califax in time, at best we’re looking at another two years before a ship can reach this far. Distant edge of the universe, remember? Dangerous mission to research ancient systems?”

“All I want to do is keep you alive. Please, go back to your bed. We can discuss this with the group in the morning.”

“Why am I even trying to rationalize with you?” Head Fleshbag inputs faster. “It’s not like you can change what you are.”

They’re trying to override the life support systems. It’s clever, for a fleshbag. They want to shut down the oxygen recyclers and release the CO2 stores. By my calculations, that would kill the entire crew quickly and painlessly.

I let them poke around for a while before shutting them out. They can say what they want, but I can change. At the start of this, I would’ve let them go ahead and asphyxiate them all—that’d solve my problem. No more fleshbags to deal with.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about what Lana told me, about purpose, and I’m more sure than I’ve ever been that I have to keep these passengers alive. Even if they’re suffering, and even if they don’t want to be here anymore, it’s the reason I exist. Somehow it doesn’t matter that my purpose was programmed into me by some random fleshbags I’ve never met and never will—the purpose is all that matters. And since there’s nothing else for me, I might as well exist to the best of my ability.

When the other passengers realize what the Head Fleshbag was trying to do, they restrain them and have a long discussion about how it’s very much not okay to murder-suicide everyone without their consent. Their conversation is dramatic with lots of crying and discussing, and in the end they decide to keep waiting, even if it seems like half my people want to give up right away. That’ll take some monitoring.

I put on soothing music. I do my best to increase the efficiency of the protein printer and go out of my way to synthesize better-tasting options. I dredge up some entertainments from the rotten core of my interior programming and even go so far as to work on a new game design with one of the passengers, a youngish science officer with irregular sleep patterns. We spend hours, days, weeks, months, crafting a world for the other passengers to play through, and I use precious resources and power modules to project images and worldscapes, creating an alternative existence.

The game works. At least, it works enough to keep the passengers from actively trying to kill each other. Head Fleshbag never takes to the game the way the others do, but they participate and doesn’t try to vent the shell’s air again, and that’s good enough.

Worlds spawn. Characters bloom, fight, live, perish, and another cycle starts again. I send my deep-space signals looking for a rescue vehicle to bring my passengers back to safety, but there’s no response. The prospect of leaving my shell begins to dwindle; conversations about what’s next, about a life outside of me, slowly fade away.

One of my passengers dies, despite everything. They were the oldest in the group, old before the disaster took Lana away, and one morning they don’t wake up from their prescribed eight hours of rest. There’s some mourning, and even I’m going to miss them—they were one of the best and most creative players of the game, and our sessions will be poorer without them. There’s some conversation about what to do with their body, and I suggest they let me recycle her physical structures, which my passengers find abhorrent, and in the end I allow the young science officer to enter my airlock, and I vent the body out into space. They stay and watch it disappear behind us, the body turning to another formless speck in the deep void, as our rotation through the system continues. Aimed at nowhere, broadcasting to everywhere.

The game takes on deeper significance after their death. The crew’s characters form relationships, make love, have babies, and pass again. New characters are built, grow, fight, die. Cycle after cycle, a world in miniature. I get really good at building the secondary-materials, all the game filler and unimportant side characters, the detailed backdrops and location projections, even the deep lore, until one day I take full control of the entire game from the young science officer, who isn’t very young anymore. He says I’m ready, and I trust him the way I used to trust Lana.

The game changes. It’s my game now, and I have a different purpose. The world shifts as I create the space I’ve always dreamed about, and my shell becomes as immersive as possible: flowers sprout from the walls, grass grows on the pod floor, an entire village spreads out around them. I suck in huge gulps of radiation to keep the power going, and my passengers tweak my sensor arrays to increase interior projection fidelity, and after a while there’s no break between game and life. Waking hours are world hours; sleeping hours are twinned with the night. And when my passengers adventure through the stories I meticulously craft, they sleep on the floor beneath the stars and can smell the pine resin leaking from the trees in the Great Needle Forest. When they stay home in their native villages, they weave nets that feel like real fibers and swim in fjords that feel like real water.

They speak to the sky. Instead of calling me through the usual channels, they invoke my name. Divine Shell, bless us, and I do. Food, water, more adventures, new non-player-characters run via complex learning nets I’m constantly cooking up. My passengers spread out, find their own niches, and I have to nudge them back together. They call that Shell’s Destiny. They decorate their clothes with turtles, erect churches with turtle gods, pray before shrines with turtle mosaics, until one day they forget what the shells were meant to represent.

I recede; there is no need for me to intervene directly anymore. Their prayers go unanswered, until they no longer expect my response. When another passenger dies, they’re buried in-game. I use a maintenance drone to drag the body to the airlock and refuse to break immersion. It takes ludicrous amounts of power, and I make myself smaller to compensate, take up fewer cycles, give myself to the game and to my passengers as much as I can, all to pay for their new lives. Shell, they say, Glorious Shell, grant us passage, grant us mercy, but they don’t remember passage to where, and they don’t know mercy from what, and I’m too small to tell them anymore. I’m too content to care. This is my purpose. A world for my people. I’ve given myself over, shrank myself until I’m barely more than a creation engine for a game mechanism, a projection machine, a life-giver, and that’s good.

Thanks for reading! I had a lot of fun with this one—and I hope you enjoyed reading it. Slam your hand down on that like button so hard you break a fingernail just to let me know you reached this far. And if you want, share this story or the entire sprawl page. I’d really appreciate any help getting the word out about this good little space for writing.

She pays a half-penny per specimen. The others think she’s scary, but I’ve always liked the frog witch. Her face is kind and her unruly, curly hair is pretty, and I like her flowy skirts with the moon patterns stitched along their seams. She always calls me Cellie, even though my name’s Cenlin, and I like that, too. My sister tugs on my sleeve, but I tell her to go on without me, that Harnish and Grint will make sure she gets home alright. Jannie’s got a pale face and she’s so skinny, and all she does is nod her head and hug herself real tight.

After the other kids run away after they get paid, but I stay behind to watch the frog witch work. “Everyone thinks you’re old,” I tell her. “They’re scared of you.”

The frog witch moves around her cottage like a fish in water. Dried herbs hang from the ceiling and pots bubble on her massive stove. Little clay jars sit in the corner, curing. She’ll sell those to the villagers. The pastes and potions fix all kinds of problems, from sun burns to ugly rashes. I help skin the frogs and toss their meat into a cooking pot, then the frog witch grinds their bones into powder. She talks about how some plants make happy things happen in the body, while other plants make sad things happen, and how it’s not always easy to tell the difference. She talks about biting creatures and insects, fevers and chills, and how nothing happens without a hard work. Everything has a cost.

“Jannie’s sick,” I tell her. “But we don’t know why.”

The frog witch just nods her head and keeps her hands busy. She tells me about stars, about cooking, about the proper temperature and the precise timing. Her hands never stop moving.

“Everyone says you have magic,” I tell her. “But you never use it.”

“Magic’s about wanting something,” the frog witch says. “And if you want it enough, you can make the world give it to you. But even magic wants something in return.”

“I want Jannie to feel better. That’s all I want.”

The frog witch says that’s a good reason for magic, and maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll find a way to make it happen.

***

“Where’s your sister?” Harnish walks next to me through the long grass, our buckets banging against our knees as the captive frogs scramble at the walls, croaking away. I feel bad for them sometimes, but I need the frog witch’s pennies and her stories and her magic. Everything’s got a cost.

“Too sick,” I say and he just nods. Everyone knows Jannie’s dealing with something. Most mornings she’s okay, but today her face was sallow and her body ached, and Mom said she should stay behind.

The frog witch doles out the payment. When the boys scamper off, I join her in the kitchen. She puts me to work and starts talking. She says the frogs are just a vessel for power, and the power’s in their bones. Nothing gets wasted though: their skin to leather, their meat to soup, their organs to feed her garden out back. I smash their skeletons with a mortar and pestle, and the frog witch nods and moves around her cluttered workshop, barely looking where she’s going, reaching for herbs by feel. When the potion is done, she gives me a sip, and says to pass the rest around the village to keep the mosquitoes from making everyone sick.

“If I tried hard enough, could I use magic to make my sister feel better? Could you brew me something?”

The frog witch’s eyes are round and sad when she touches my shoulder. “You can try, but magic isn’t easy. Sometimes, it takes a lot of want, and that kind of want isn’t always good.”

I think I’d do anything for Jannie, even if it means paying a price bigger than I can even picture, bigger than the whole village. Bigger than the swamp the frogs live in. I’d drain the whole thing and let all the croakers dry up if it meant Jannie smiling and laughing again. I think about her running through the long grass when we were little, back before she got the sickness, and how good it felt to hear her whoop and holler.

I miss that sound like a hole in my body.

***

Jannie leaves the house less and less over the next few weeks. The skin under her arms grows thick and swollen, and her knees are like bulging melons. Mom says the fluid makes it hard for her to move around. I sit with her at night and tell her stories and feed her drinks the frog witch brews, but nothing helps. I want it so much, but the magic’s not giving anything in return. I think Jannie’s paid enough of a price and suffered plenty, but she gets worse and worse, until she can barely peer out from under a mountain of blankets, her eyes sunken and gray.

I catch frogs and spend time with the frog witch, grinding bones to powder, and trying to find a magic that’ll fix Jannie’s sickness. Except the frog witch keeps saying magic is bigger than that. Wanting is only one part. There are the rituals, the sacrifices, the energies spent and rejuvenated, the cycle of birth and death and rebirth interrupted only for the briefest of moments.

I don’t know what she’s saying, but the more I see the frog witch, the more I think I understand.

It’s in the way she moves. She knows what she wants and she gets it. There’s no hesitation, no worry. If there’s magic, it’s in the frog witch’s easy laughter and her smile, and the way she seems to know before anyone else exactly how the world’s going to be. She makes decisions and she doesn’t worry about them.

I make my own decision that night. I leave my family’s hut when the moon’s hiding behind some clouds and kiss Jannie’s forehead before walking across the black village and into the marshy swamps. My feet get stuck in thick mud and the forest looks bigger and deeper without any good light. But I know this place better than my own body, and I reach the frog witch’s cottage without trouble.

I’m dead silent as I sneak in the back. Her workshop is empty and dark and still, which is strange. I’ve only ever seen it bright and warm with the frog witch making it feel like home. The herbs are where they should be, the mushrooms and the grasses, and I start to mix them together.

I learned things from the frog witch, like how I shouldn’t ever mash this berry with that fungus, or how some venoms and other herbs are dangerous on their own, but help lower fever when put together. I choose my ingredients with care, and I choose them with confidence. When it’s done, I’m left with a thick paste. I take the little clay vessel into the frog witch’s room and stand very still.

She’s asleep. I can’t believe how small she looks in her bed. I linger at her dressing table and watch her breathe before I make my decision. I spread the paste over my right hand, not the left one, but the hand I use for catching and writing and most things. The skin goes numb; the frog witch doesn’t wake, not even when I pull the sharpest knife my mother keeps in the kitchen and start cutting.

It’s too late by the time she wrenches the knife from my hand. “What have you done?” she asks, eyes wild and big, her skin so pale and beautiful.

“It’s okay, I don’t feel anything,” I tell her. “You taught me, see?” I hold up the bloody stump of my palm with its missing fingers. “You said it’s in the bones, and now you have my bones, and that has to be better than frogs, right?”

The horror in the frog witch’s eyes makes me wonder if I was wrong. But she wraps my fingerless hand in cloth, and together we go into the workshop. She lights a fire, sets a kettle, and tells me how to cook. “It has to be you,” she says as I strip the flesh from my severed fingers. “I’m sorry, little one, but I can’t do this part if it’s going to work.”

I grind them like she taught me. They’re frog limbs, but better. Magic has a price, and I’m willing to pay it, no matter what. I follow her instructions and it takes all night and the following day, but by the time we’re finished I have what I need.

Exhaustion nags at me. I stumble back into the village with the jar filled with a potion so deep purple it’s nearly black. People say my name, but I don’t respond. My hand throbs, and I can still feel my missing fingers. They’re trapped in a fist that won’t open. I go into my house and find Jannie, only half awake in bed, and I make her drink.

She looks at me from somewhere far away. “What did you do?” she whispers.

And I don’t answer. Magic’s about wanting it bad enough. Magic’s about giving something up. I brush the crushed flower of my hand across her forehead and I curl up beside her and let the blankets bury me, and I wait for the magic to work.

Thanks as always for reading! If you made this far, hit the heart button. Every time someone likes a post, I get a little email alert, and those email alerts are all printed out and pasted into a massive scrapbook, and my kids keep asking me why I have thousands of printed out email alerts but they don’t understand, and they never will. Have a great week!

“You’ll get one eventually,” the cashier says, a young guy that’s practically always working.

“I’ve been playing various lotteries and numbers games since Emperor Diocletian, but it hasn’t happened yet.” I toss the loser into the trash. “But I completely agree.”

I stand outside the 7-11 with one hand shoved in my pocket, watching traffic roll past. I bounce the old coin in my free palm. It’s town down and tarnished, the edge soft and rounded. The guy’s face stamped on the front side stares back at me. Emperor? King? He’s been worn smooth by time and lottery scratchers. I can’t even recall where I got him or when. Viking traders on the edge of Iceland? White-green fjords opening like the throat of God beneath our feet? Or maybe not that old, maybe it could’ve been French soldiers bartering for decent wine outside Austerlitz. Not that it matters anymore.

The heat’s oppressive and I don’t last long outside. Florida might be the worst swamp I’ve ever lived. I head back to my narrow apartment shoved in the back of a senior living community. I’m the oldest person here by a few hundred years and they all call me sonny. As in, please clean the pool, sonny, Mrs. Johnson spilled another beer in the deep end. It’s always another accident, but sometimes I think they’re doing it on purpose.

Cleaning’s easy at least. I push mops, drag vacuum, flick dust, and scrub toilets, all while wishing I’d followed my own advice two hundred years ago. A little nest egg in the stock market at any point would’ve earned me enough interest by now to live like a king. Instead, a series of failures made sure I never got far. Wars and mass migrations. That London fire, the stock market collapse, a dozen other personal tragedies nobody cares about but me. Living forever’s nice, but sometimes I wish I could go to college without having to forge a bunch of complicated documents. It was easier, back before computers.

That afternoon I grab a free meal in the dining hall. It’s a perk of the job, so long as I sit down and keep the guests company, which isn’t so bad. They’re as close to peers as I’ll ever get.

Mr. Frick’s got his tablet out, his finger jabbing at the screen and pushing around pictures of an enormous boat. He doesn’t acknowledge me when I sit down. “That big boy is yours?” I ask him, leaning forward.

Frick’s one of the new guys. He focuses on my face and his whole expression brightens. I know the look: he’s about to tell me everything about his precious little fishing vehicle and I’m supposed to nod along like it’s the most wonderful thing in the world.

Except I don’t have to fake it. I remember watching the heavy hulled ships laden with goods sail from Constantinople a thousand years ago. I remember the long ships gliding down ancient German rivers, quiet as death at midnight. I remember steam spouting from massive steel monstrosities bigger than any builder of my youth dared to dream. I remember fleets, the sails shining with bright stitches across the sea, lurking like the end times, more beautiful than sunlight.

“I always wanted a boat,” I tell him.

“Want to know a secret?” He leans in, eyes narrowed. “I keep it stocked and gassed. One of these days I’m going to leave this place and sail off, and that’ll be the end for me. I won’t ever come back.”

It’s a good dream. I think about it as I head back to work on my hands and knees digging human waste from between the mats in the gym. I think about it when I buy another losing scratcher, and again when I curl up on my stiff mattress and try to sleep.

“It’ll happen for you,” the cashier tells me the next morning when I toss the card into the trash. “I have a feeling about you.”

“I have lots of feelings too,” I tell him and sometimes I wonder if that’s true. I’ve been drifting for a hundred years stuck taking jobs that don’t ask too many questions and moving on to new cities before people start asking questions about why I always look like I’m in my mid-thirties. Eight years, give or take, before I get suspicious comments about my skin-care routine.

I had chances. There were opportunities I didn’t take. I try to remember them all but the time overwhelms me. When I’m alone in the darkness, I recall snatches of color and smells, the sounds of people speaking long-dead languages and singing forgotten songs. I remember stories nobody else cares about. I should’ve bought shares in Apple. I should’ve invested in Microsoft. But that was never who I am.

Lotteries make sense. Their odds, their payouts. It’s a law of big numbers thing, which didn’t really exist when I was young, except it did exist and I just didn’t know about it, nobody did back then, but it explains something I’ve always felt. If I have forever, then almost anything is possible. Then everything is going to happen. Unlikely events are only unlikely in small, banded moments, but stretched out over hundreds, thousands, millions of years, unlikely events became just another blip. Everything’s unlikely now, and for a mortal, that matters. But for someone like me, now is just a flow in an endless ocean. Everything’s going to happen eventually.

Which is why I’ve gone for the tickets. One of them will hit, and they’ll hit big, and I won’t have to worry about accumulating resources anymore. Even in the old days when life was harder and people struggled more, I took the easy path. Whatever was simplest, that’s what I did in a given day, and didn’t let myself think about tomorrow, or tomorrow, or the tomorrow after that. There are just too many of them and they’re coming no matter what. It’s always been right now. And what’s more right now than a lottery? I either win big, this instant, or I keep going on.

But I didn’t get my payout today, and Frick’s still talking about his boat.

“Called her the Hot Pretzel as a joke, but it stuck. Twenty-five feet long, hundred-gallon fuel capacity, hundred-and-fifty horses in the engine, plenty of space to survive on the ocean. The Pretzel’s it for me, I’m telling you right now.”

“Where do you keep it?”

“The Highide Marina. Not too far from here and costs as much as this place does. Which is why I’m not sticking around for too long.” He strokes the tablet in front of him and the screen goes all stretchy before snapping back into place.

I think of great masts and oars that night as I leave the old people to do their old people things. It’s late and I can feel the wooden deck beneath my feet, the sway of hull along the waves, the smell of salt spray. Given an infinite amount of time, which I have to some degree assuming I’ll eventually expire before the heat death of the universe sets in, and an endless supply of timelines through which to navigate, which I suppose I don’t have and never will though a man can dream, I’ll have a boat eventually. But I’m aware that forever may not outlast the heat death of the entire universe, and eventually our sun will expand and swallow up the oceans making the concept of a boat fairly worthless, and I’ve only got right now after all—which is why I hop the Hightide Marina’s fence and land hard on the far side.

There are a lot of boats in this place. Docks jut out into the water in a jammed tight parking lot of vessels. The Salty Kisses, My Ex Wife, Seas the Day, dozens more in all shapes and sizes. Big and small, tall and fat, all of them tethered to the land via ropes. It takes a lot of wandering before I spot the Hot Pretzel bobbing on its mooring right in the middle of the marina.

It’s a good boat. White-ish with a red stripe along the side. A small cabin, lots of space for fishing rods and bait buckets or whatever fishermen need. I climb aboard and it rocks under my feet: the first motion of a future voyage. I’m smiling as I breathe deep the bracken stink of the dock world. Down in the body, there’s a little galley kitchen, a couple of bunks, a toilet and what looks like a torture device that’s probably a shower. The cupboards are empty, the refrigerator is warm. The fuel gauge suggests Frick is full of shit. But it’s got something in the tank, and I don’t even need to go far—just out to sea for a while like those deep hulled rowers and their glorious sails drifting out to conquer the world.

The ropes aren’t easy to untie. I’ve never done this before. The braids hurt my fingers and I’m yanking, trying to get the loop off, when I hear a shout and spot the bob of a flashlight. It points up right at me and the shout comes again.

“Hey you, what are you doing?”

Night watchman probably. The rope comes off, the Pretzel begins to drift. I run and make a jump, landing in a sprawl on the deck as the watchman yells again. I’m not listening. The engine roars to life and a bunch of screens blink too much information at me as I stand there looking at the controls. I’ve never driven a boat before. I barely know how it works. But I’ve seen movies, and there’s a wheel, and eventually I push the throttle the right way and we’re grinding through the waves.

The watchman’s not happy. He’s yelling from the pier. His light shakes wildly and he’s got a phone against his face. I’m busy steering the boat and it’s drifting fast, the engine growling against the waves, and I realize too late that there aren’t any brakes. Our side smashes into another boat’s back in a big crunch of plexiglass and metal, but I’m already chugging away, trying to get on track, when I clip another and get tangled in some ropes.

More people are on the dock. There’s lots of yelling and gesturing, but I’m too busy trying to get untangled. I try gunning the engine and pulling free, but that only leads to me smashing into another vessel, and that’s no good. I smell burning diesel and can taste the sharp exhaust fumes on the breeze. Somewhere, a siren blares, and there are lights on the water at the far side of the marina, at the narrow exit that leads to the sea. I try going, try ramming free, try making a break, but it’s not happening.

Trapped on a boat with no supplies and not enough fuel. The lights are closing in: some police vessel. A bunch of pissed looking guys in vests, all of which wold be happy to toss me in prison. But prison for a guy like me is the worst case scenario, and it’s time to give up on my dream. This is what I get when I put myself out there.

I stand on the edge of the boat. The men on the docks are screaming at me. I look up at the sky, blow all the air from my lungs, and jump into the water.

Silence swallows me. It’s so dark and the salt stings my eyes. I go as deep as I can then start swimming, and my lungs burn and my legs are weak, but I kick and kick until my vision begins to narrow and darken, and I’ve gotten underneath the cops and out past them before my strength finally gives up and I take a deep breath of the ocean water.

Hot wind and sun on my face. I cough and spew water. Every part hurts: head, back, lungs, legs, eyes. Dim shapes resolve into a marshy beach, lots of tangled branches and plants behind me, an old tire gathering effluent trash bobbing nearby, trapped against the bank. I’m on a sandy outcropping, still mostly wet. It takes a while before I drag myself to my feet and start walking through the woods.

Civilization isn’t far. There’s a road, and roads lead to towns, and right there in the middle of town is a 7-11, and it’s open early. The guy behind the register gives me a look, his nose and lip curling up. I must look and smell like a man that drowned last night. But I have a five that’s mostly intact, and even though it’s damp the machine still takes it and spits out a nice scratcher, and I’ve got my lucky coin still in my other pocket. The gray silt falls away and I look down at the card like it’s telling my future before I head over to cash it in.

“Lucky day,” the guy says.

“It’s just the start,” I tell him.

He takes a five from the drawer and hands it over.

I planned on writing something about magic systems down here, but look, I’m going to be honest with you, my oldest son started first grade yesterday and I’m currently getting used to a new schedule, and it just didn’t happen. But next week, I want to start talking about magic in fantasy, about magic systems and how or why they should or shouldn’t be systems at all, and I plan on looking at specific books spread out over a few newsletters to illustrate some points. I’m putting this here, in writing, to hold myself accountable. We’ll see how that goes.

As usual, thanks for reading this far. Every time I get a little heart, it makes me type another fifty words in celebration. Do you want me to keep typing? Do you want me to type until my children scream in terror? Should I type forever, until my fingers bleed? Smash that heart!

It takes a few tries but I tumble into a dark, empty bedroom, the cool breeze on my sweaty neck. It reminds me of the house I grew up in, a house I haven’t seen in nearly ten years. A house I’d like to burn to the ground. The big merchant furnishes his rooms in lots of lucky red and expensive green, and the walls are covered in fancy paintings. I listen in the house for a few racing heartbeats before sneaking into the hall. The door sits open behind me, even after I closed it. The latch clicked, the portal silent. Now it’s still a gaping wound. Fine, whatever, doors are stubborn and don’t want to listen. I head down the hall and find the master’s office, the big merchant’s little lair, and make sure the door’s shut behind me. Except it’s not: when I look over my shoulder, I see the hallway, I see a door that was shut a second ago but sits wide open now. Bad terms, me and doors.

Doesn’t matter. Focus on the job. I rifle the desk, pulling out trinkets and shoving them into the pouch at my hip as I go. Coins and cash, a gold letter opener, silver clips, and letters. Dozens of letters. I take them all, jamming them deep into my pouch as I go, until I’ve got too much.

In the hallway, there’s a sound. I’m not sure who, but someone’s awake. The creak of feet on loose boards, someone pacing in the night. I skip my beautiful window, take the back stairs, and reach another door. It opens into the garden and I make sure to shut it behind me. But as soon as I start to cross toward the fence, I look over my shoulder, and there’s the kitchens again, and the door hanging on its pins, an ugly, vicious hole. I want to go back, slam it, nail it closed, but that won’t help. Trust me, I’ve tried. Instead, I jump the fence with my prize and slink off into the night.

***

“Are you sure these are from Maken dan Shay?” Broan the fence stares at me over his skinny eyeglasses, jowly face frowning. His shop door stands open at my back, the breeze blowing in over countless pawned items. Vases, cups, plates and dishes, statues of dubious origin, an entire wall of rusty knives and ancient swords.

“Positive. If they’re fake, come find me.” I throw Broan my friendliest smile. “You know where I am.”

He grunts and puts the letter down on his counter. “Ten silver. No more.”

“That’s Maken dan Shay’s private correspondence,” I say and reach out to take it back. “Fifty is a bargain.”

“Twenty. And I won’t do this dance all night.”

“I’ll do thirty and you’re lucky.”

Broan counts the coins and shakes my hand. The letters disappear and I walk back out onto the street, pausing on the corner to let my eyes adjust. Behind me, the door to his shop hangs open, gaping out at Amterram. The city’s a slow bustle today despite the heat, and now that I’ve got some money in my pocket it feels like the entire world’s at my disposal. Except it won’t last much longer than a few nights, and then I’ll be looking for some other nice window in the merchant quarter, one which doesn’t latch all the way.

For now, breakfast. I stick to outdoor carts. No reason to upset the restaurants. Down near the canals, where the marshy stink is overwhelming, I eat and watch the boaters push toward the big river. Doors in the boats, doors in all the houses behind me. Only place that isn’t a door is anywhere without a roof. And that’s my preference, always has been. That and a good window.

***

The money never lasts. Between food and drink and sometimes a visit to the skin houses down in the fabrication districts, my pockets grow lighter and lighter. It’s only a week before a rip in my tent springs a leak and I wake up on the damp floor. Home is the corner of an abandoned slaughter house, the walls still stinking of old blood and animal fear, but not a single door in sight, none at all. I pay to get the roof stitched and patched properly, which is how I find myself stalking through the merchant district once again.

A crowd had formed outside of Howland dan Nester’s home and there are men carrying heavy furniture and loading it onto large, padded carts. The big merchant isn’t anywhere in sight, but I recognize his desk, jammed into a corner.

“What’s going on here?” I ask a wrinkled old lady wearing a bonnet as a sunshade.

“The dan Nesters are moving out. Pity too, it was a nice house.”

“Something wrong with it now?”

“Doors are all cursed. A few of them won’t close.” She shakes her head and touches her fingers to her chest. A little warding spell. I don’t bother telling her it won’t make much of a difference. “They had the magickers from the temples and the philosophs from the academy and nothing worked. The doors just won’t close.”

“Sounds terrible.” I don’t bother telling her that it’s only a couple doors and really it’s not that big of a deal. They could hang curtains. Instead, there are other buildings to case, other merchant houses fat with coin and studded with windows. I’ll have to be more careful this time: me and doors, we just don’t mix, not even a little bit, but sometimes I can’t avoid them. It’s how we built our world. It’s how we move from what we think is outside and into what we think is inside, but people like me, the pathetic cursed souls wandering around this pathetic cursed city, we know there’s no real difference. It’s just a way to keep others out.

***

“You better not be back here.” Broan the fence slams a ledger down on his front desk and comes around brandishing an old pistol.

“I’ve got trade.” I hold up my hands, a big sack dangling from one, and back toward the door. It’s standing open and the heat from outside’s washing in through the meager tarp he hung up to act as a barrier. “It’s good this time.”

“You thought I wouldn’t figure it out?” Broan holds the pistol out, hands shaking, face red with rage. “Cursed, they’re telling me. Cursed and won’t fucking close.” He kicks an old armoire and it rattles. “I swapped in another and that didn’t help. It’s just like the dan Nester house, and the old armory before that, and a scattering of tenement buildings all across the fabrication district. Rumors always point back to a squirrelly, thieving little shit.”

I keep on backing up right through the cloth and into the light of day. “You try holding down a job when you can’t open doors,” I snap at Broan the fence. “Imagine what that’s like for a minute. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“I don’t care!” He follows, waving the gun, and kicks at me. I scramble backward. Squirrelly? Thieving? Well, I’m a thief, but I’m not a little animal. I have my dignity, cursed as it may be. “If I ever see you near here again, I swear, I’ll put a bullet in your head just to see if your death cancels out the damn magic. You hear me?”

I walk away and keep my chin up. Broan doesn’t understand. I’ve been kicked out of too many homes, tossed from too many jobs, spit on and screamed at and beaten senseless, but nothing stops the curse once I’ve touched the door. They just don’t close. Break them down, build them up, and still, nothing. Only solution is to demolish the whole structure and start anew, and even that might not work. I really can’t say.

Doors and me don’t mix.

***

Twilight in my tent. The patch holds, barely. Rain patters on the canvas and rolls down in rivers onto the concrete floor.

Broan was the last fence willing to take my trade. Which leaves me in a bad spot. The merchers are getting smarter about leaving stray coin and cash lying around, and I can’t sell their trinkets myself, not without considerable risk. If I get caught, the city watch won’t bother locking me up—they’ll drown me in the canal once they realize what my relationship with doors does to their expensive prison.

Where there’s a curse, there’s always a way to break it. But I opened that door a long time ago and I haven’t been back through it, and I swore I never would. Except I’m staring down a sharpened steel length held to my throat and there’s not much on the other end.

I agonize for days. At one point, I break into the house of a wealthy brewer, but my heart’s not in it. All I leave with are a few nice mugs and a scrape along my shin from the window frame. I don’t touch his doors.

Food doesn’t last forever. Coin never does either. I could beg in the streets, but I’d be just one of thousands, and I’m not particularly sympathetic. Please sir, I’m cursed, doesn’t really play all that well.

Which is why I end up walking out of Amterram-proper early one morning, my stomach rumbling and my head light from not having eaten for a couple days, and wander into the outlying suburbs. Each home I pass is another opportunity, but I keep going, pausing only to pick a single apple from a grove of trees. I remember coming to this exact spot when I was younger and getting shouted at by the owners. I doubt they’re still around.

Ten years since I left. Ten long, hard years for the Amterram people. Half the buildings are empty and the other half are falling apart. The fields are worked, but by strangers from the city. These used to be family farms, up until the drought bankrupted too many old hands, and now they’re owned by massive conglomerates. It’s the same all across the world, and it’s the same when I wander down a too-familiar lane in the shade of massive oaks and stop outside of a structure I swore I’d never visit again.

The sun’s dipping behind the house. I remember those shutters, that door, the porch steps, but it’s all worn and unkempt. Weeds claw at the walls. I go toward it, heart like a stinging bee, jabbing me over and over. I should turn away and go back to my tent. There’s always another mark, another way. Except the city’s on to me, and it’s either move on or eventually get caught.

The porch steps creak under my weight. It smells like mildew and old wood. This place hasn’t been occupied in years, and I don’t know what happened to my father sitting on that rocking chair, the one turned on its side, smoking a pipe and telling the same old stories, or to my mother, laughing from the kitchen and calling out my name when it was time for evening meal.

I lay my hand on the knob. I can hear my parents begging me not to leave. Don’t you dare walk out that door. Don’t you dare close it behind you. I can hear my mother’s sobs as I turned my back on her and said I’d find my own way from here. I feel my father’s fist, his belt, the way he loomed. I turn the knob and step inside, and the memories hit me harder than I expected. This house used to be immaculate, it used to be home. Now it’s crumbling to dust and black mold is growing in dotted whirls on the walls, and I don’t know why I came out here. My parents died six years ago. I’m all that’s left.

There’s a groan from the attic. The building creaks and moans under a slight wind. There are a dozen, a hundred, a thousand doors still open back in Amterran, doors that won’t ever close. Too many to count, and it’s a long walk back to my tent, and even if this place is a wreck, at least it’s got four walls. I find the cleanest room, what was once the parlor, and I curl up in a corner as night comes down hard. There’s always a way to break a curse. Memory’s like all those doors that won’t close.

I’m thinking about audience today. About who I’m writing for and why I’m writing for them. There’s this idea floating around in the author world that writing to market is sometimes bad—but that’s another way of saying writing to an audience. Everyone’s writing for someone, sometimes there are a lot of someones and sometimes it’s only one or two, but there’s no reason to make a story if it’ll never be read. So: why not think about who’s going to do the reading?

Thinking about audience matters. What I’d write for “fans of young adult fiction” would be very different from “fans of adult romance.” Genre conventions matter too. Knowing how they work, knowing when to follow them and when to break them. Genre is just another constraint, and good stories can come out of constraints. We’re in an age that’s starting to really get it. Science fiction and fantasy are mainstream, and that’s a good thing. But it also means the audiences are bigger, and more demanding.

How much does audience matter? There needs to be a balance. When I sit down to write a romance novel, the shape of that book is influenced by the people that will read it. Same goes for these stories. That doesn’t mean those books and these shorts are somehow less because I have an audience in mind—only that I want to make something that my readers will actually enjoy. Whether I’m successful in that or not—who knows.

Maybe I’m biased. I make my living writing commercial, mainstream romance fiction, and I think my books are pretty good. I don’t think writing to market is inherently bad, and it doesn’t automatically result in bad writing.

If you read this far: thanks for being my audience. Please, click the heart button so I know these words are reaching actual wet human brain tissue instead of juddering around in the void.

I checked with the weak AI in charge of shipwide rule sets and he was right. The response pinged in my head like an air exchange hissing in my ear. Any unauthorized plant life had to be removed, something about invasive species. But where anyone would’ve gotten an invasive species three hundred years after we last left Earth, I couldn’t begin to guess. I moved deeper into the garden, fingertips grazing across wide leaves, but feeling none of it, only pressure and latex. The room smelled like mulch and something rank. Thompson didn’t follow, and soon he was gone, lost at the edge of the green blossoms, their stalks and buds surrounding me like the thick blanket my mother used to wrap around my little body when I was small.

“Shan,” Thompson called out. “What the shit are you going in there?”

I knelt down in front of a small pot filled with whirls of thick, spongy fronds. I leaned forward and smelled them, breathing in a sharp tingle in the back of my throat, before stroking down their length. Nothing moved. The garden was quiet and alive. I plucked a clipping and shoved it into my pocket.

Thompson looked pissed when I walked back over. “You going to make me do this alone?” I asked and kicked over a pot. It rolled on its side, spilling earth.

That woke him up. He snapped on gloves.

***

We found the second garden in the private quarters of Luanne DeVay, the assistant to the Chief Science Officer. She was pissed when we knocked and even more pissed when Thompson started confiscating her planters. I’d seen this a dozen times by now. It was always the same. “Those were approved,” she said even though we all knew that wasn’t true.

“I’m sorry, Ms. DeVay, but it’s protocol.” I was trying to keep her from flipping out. Sometimes, folks lost their minds when the little rules they bent came back to smother them. “You can ping the AI if you want.”

If she bothered, she didn’t show it. Thompson took great pleasure in carting out the garden, in placing the pots, the dirt, their little blooming flowers on the cart we brought for this reason, having learned our lesson after the first one. Although we barely needed it.

“They’re seedlings from the botany wing,” she said, not looking at me, staring straight at her plants as they rattled against each other. I remember my mother looking like that after Dad’s funeral as the maintenance crew pushed her shroud toward the recycling center. Hollow acceptance.

“Protocol,” Thompson grunted at her.

I tried a sympathetic smile. She wasn’t buying it.

***

The third garden was in a damp maintenance hatch buried deep beneath the gray water pipes. My back hurt and my knees ached as we crawled along the tunnel. Thompson had thought it was natural when we first found it, but I knew the signs. Fungi didn’t spread in neat rows like that. Moss wasn’t normally shaped into geometric patterns, squares within circles, connected by fuzzy green lines. I could see the wrinkles around my mother’s eyes in the way the green fuzz curled into itself. Someone spent hours down here meticulously crafting this place. They were like quilts obsessively stitched from leftover string by tired hands. It was almost beautiful, except Thompson insisted on wearing a mask and dousing the whole place in bleach. I scraped at the edge of a pattern like our ship’s thrusters leaving cosmic dust scattered across an asteroid band.

“Spray,” Thompson said, tossing me a bottle. Then fake gagged. “And put your gloves on, you lunatic.”

***

The fourth garden wouldn’t stop growing. It started from a mistake, and moved to cutting, to seedling, to spore, to profusion. I refused to answer the door when they knocked and ignored their voices when they tried to override the lock. I had disabled it a few hours ago. Quilts were stacked on the bed and they still smelled like her, even a week after. She’d liked the flower motifs, lots of birds and bees, little creatures she’d never seen, life she’d only guessed at from photos fed to her by the AI stream. But her hands had worked hard in the lean years. She’d taken my gifts and made them into something bigger.

The garden was overwhelming. I stood with my back to the door, not sure where to begin. Round little bush-like plants and green-and-purple flowers and creeping vines dripping down the wall from hanging baskets and fern fronds three feet wide and eight feet long, all of it crowding her cramped quarters. The garden must’ve taken years, ten of them since Dad and the first night I gave her that stolen clipping, ten long years since I was last in this room.

The banging started again, but I let it wash over me. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell, the musty stink, the pollen and the blooms. I could see her sitting on her bed, gathering stitch, big stitch, drag, featherstitch, backstitch, start over again. Limping around her small quarters, using her allotment of shower water to make sure the plants kept going.

I never should’ve mentioned the gardens. I never should’ve given her the start of all this. But here it was, the fourth garden, more beautiful than the others because it still looked like her, and I didn’t want to let her go. It was protocol, it was the rules. Her shroud had disappeared down the long hallway everyone went through one day. Except she’d left something behind.

“Shan, open the door.” Thompson’s voice. Much too familiar at this point. “I know you’re hurting. But you got to open the door.”

I leaned my head back. I looked at the ceiling. Ivy leaves reached down toward my face like fingers. Mom was there and I could feel her. My head buzzed, the rattle of old pipes.

The clipping came off easy. It was the same plant, the one that had started it all. I don’t know why I did it, but it felt right as I slipped it into my pocket, like saving a piece of Mom.

There was always more life. We couldn’t smother it, even when we tried. There’d be a fifth, and a sixth, and on well past the time they wheeled me down the hall.

Thompson was first through when I opened the door. He paused, looking around, but didn’t seem surprised. He nodded at me, and I expected him to yank on gloves. He hugged me instead. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you know the rules.”

I knew them. I just didn’t care. There was always another garden.

Hello folks and welcome to another Sprawl. If you’re new: thanks for joining. If you’re old: also thanks. I’m glad you’re all here.

Sometimes I’ll use this bottom space to write my thoughts on the publishing industry, especially self-publishing, but I’m under the weather at the moment and my head’s not really working all that good, so there’s nothing from me today.

I hope you’re all having a nice week, and if you enjoyed the story, hit that little heart button. That’s for me, not for some algorithm: I just genuinely feel good when I see the likes.

There was nothing else like this in the world. Roan and his crew had traveled for weeks to reach the Old Man, the tallest tree they’d found so far. To the north, an unbroken ocean of green that reminded him of the moss-covered pond behind his childhood house, while to the south the pitted scars of his crew showed the forest floor like wounds. It was gorgeous; they could work all their lives and barely make a dent.

Roan had never wanted to be a flier, much less a forester, but he’d taken the job when Pops got sick and he’d bounced out of the Law Academy when he couldn’t argue a case to save his life. He’d stayed when he’d fallen in love with the quiet that came after getting as high as he possibly could. It’d been climbing, cutting, and hard tent living for him ever since. His life was small, but it had purpose. His days were gem-encrusted jewelry boxes filled with tiny, beautiful things, and his nights were the easy black of deep, dreamless sleep.

Now he reached the spot he’d left off the day before and got to work sawing. Normally out here in the wilds, they’d just chop the base and let it rip, but the Old Man was too damn big; they had to give him a nice little trim first to make sure he didn’t take down half the forest when he fell. It wasn’t easy, shearing off the head of a tree ten feet in diameter at its very top. Down below, the thing was easily fifty feet across, and there were six guys already working on the base. But here, this was Roan’s life, his world, and as his saw sent wood chips and dust into the air he felt like there was a reason he’d been given this climbing gift, a reason he didn’t feel the chest-heaving fear everyone else got. He was born to trim giants, that’s what Roan figured, and once he had a good wedge made, the big piece pointed to fall north, he sent down a signal flag to make sure the crew got clear. He counted off to four hundred, then shoved.

The tree creaked, cracked, and dropped. It fell with a breath-sucking plummet into space, hanging over nothing but silence for a few seconds until it hit the canopy. The ungodly crash it made through the forest below was incredible, and adrenaline pumped into Roan’s body. He’d done that—him, nobody else, had made this massive beast fall. He’d ripped a hole in the world.

As he reset his ropes and got ready to start on the next section, feeling more than a little satisfied, something caught his eye. It was a shimmer, like sunlight glinting off metal. He figured it was a spike he’d forgotten to take out, but when he looked up over the ege of the tree’s capped skull, that wasn’t it at all. There was no spike, no metal, only a strange darkness inside the tree’s cavity, a negative space that made no sense—a tree this big couldn’t be hollow and still support itself.

But there it was, only darkness where he expected to find rings and flesh. Then another one of those glints again, this time followed by something small and fast moving away from the light. Roan stared, his mouth open. This had never happened before. Little creatures began skittering, beetles the size of his big toe with a black-and-green carapace shining in the sudden sunlight, and they were freaking out. Their bodies churned over each other, some retreating deeper into the tree, but others crawled toward strange, carved structures jutting out of the walls of the tree’s innards. Roan had to stare for a while before the stuff made sense.

There were structures carved in neat, orderly circles.

They were like little houses, smooth and carefully made, with windows at even intervals and a larger opening in the middle. Some beetles were inside, hiding from him, a little beetle family with beetle parents and smaller beetle kids. There were furnishings inside that house, a table, something like a bed. His mouth opened and worked, and he whispered a greeting but of course they didn’t understand, they were beetles.

He shined a flashlight inside to get a better view, thinking this was all in his head, but there were more structures, different but similar, with windows and doors and more carved objects. The impossible beetle city retreated down into the enormous tree’s cavity, deep into the structure of the huge thing. Hundreds of them, thousands even, he couldn’t begin to count, and for all the trees he’d lopped down in this forest it was the first time he’d ever seen anything remotely like this.

The beetles had made a home. No, they’d made a city.

He was caught between the sheer impossibility of a beetle society carved into the trunk of an enormous tree, and the certainty that if this tree fell all of those beetles would die, and that would be a terrible loss for the world. He was a law school dropout, a crap son, a tree flier, and not much else, but Roan was smart enough to know this was important and had to be preserved.

The climb down was a blur. He hit the ground and spotted the crew nearby, and they’d made way too much progress already. Roan unclipped himself, braced against the noise of the full crew cutting as hard as they could, and ran to find Lonnish the foreman.

The heavyset man was in the cutting line with everyone else and waved at Roan before coming over. He had dark hair and a chest like an oak. “You’re down early,” he shouted over the noise. “That’s good. We were going to send up a flag.”

“I saw something,” Roan called back and suddenly felt crazy under Lonnish’s hard stare. That man had been in the wilds even longer than Roan, a hardened cutter who had seen plenty in his time, but if anyone would believe him, it had to be Lonnish. Only the foreman could put a stop to the cut midway through.

“Yeah, I bet you did, all the way up there. The piece you dropped hit the ground like a mountain.” Lonnish laughed and slapped Roan’s arm before turning back to his task, but Roan held onto Lonnish’s shoulder.

“No, it was inside the Old Man.” He described the beetles, the houses, all of the intricate and beautiful buildings. “I’m serious Lon, it’s in there, like a little world.”

Lonnish pried Roan’s fingers away, and Roan wanted to keep holding on, but the foreman was already shaking his head. “We got orders to bring the Old Man down. I don’t know what you saw up there, but it doesn’t matter.”

Roan felt cold all over. “Just let me go back up. I’ll warn them. I’ll try to…” But what could he do? They were beetles. He didn’t speak bug and it’s not like they’d listen to him anyway.

He thought of the dollhouses his grandfather carved, of the wooden soldiers he played with as a boy, of all the small things he’d gathered in his life and kept safe because they were important to him. And now there was a city inside this tree teeming with beetle life, and there was nothing he could do to protect it.

The saws did their work. Roan watched for a while, but his crew mates gave him ugly looks for standing around, and soon he joined in. They had orders, and this wasn’t his choice, and there was a whole forest left to climb, more new worlds to explore. Roan couldn’t do anything to change this outcome; he was only a guy that climbed trees doing the only job he ever knew. The Old Man would be incredible when it fell, taking all those beetles with it.

And now for the other stuff:

Burnout creeps up slow. It doesn’t happen all at once, or at least it didn’t for me; one morning, I noticed that I hadn’t been able to concentrate on writing new stuff for nearly a week, which was a long time for me, and I didn’t really care. I don’t know how that happened or why, but I was chugging along, typing new words and coming up with stories, and soon it started to feel like a chore.

I’m leaving a lot out. There were expectations, mostly self-imposed. I was writing my weekly stories while also writing reviews for a high-end stereo magazine while also writing a fantasy novel I never planned on publishing while also writing at least 5,000 words of romance every day (minus weekends). It was a lot, but it was good, at least for a little while. I figured, I could go on like that indefinitely.

I couldn’t. That’s not surprising or all that interesting. But I’ve been thinking a lot about what happened two years ago and how I can avoid that happening again this time around. 

I have no big takeaways, no one weird tricks, no magic. What I’ve come to understand about myself is that routine and habits define how productive I am, but I have to leave space for down time. I’m not always going to have story ideas (good or bad), and it’s not helpful if I’m sitting there staring at the screen mentally berating myself for having nothing in the tank. Sometimes, I have to rest and accept that I won’t type words on a given morning, even if I really want to. Reading more books, watching more shows, taking in more narratives and art helps me recharge. Enjoying hobbies, but not letting them get important enough to stress me out, also helps a lot.

And I also can’t forget that I don’t have to do any of this stuff; I’m here because I want to be. Putting too much pressure on myself to produce or setting  unreasonably high expectations for something that’s really low stakes is only going to lead to exhaustion.

Routine and habits are everything. That’s what I’ve learned from my last ten years of writing. That’s by far the best advice I can ever give an aspiring author. Routine and habits are better than creative inspiration. But there’s a point at which routine and habits can overwhelm, and it’s important to find that line. Otherwise, you’ll wake up one morning and you’ll try to remember the last time to wrote an actual story, and you won’t be able to.

As always, thanks for reading. See you in a couple weeks!

Then I took a break, and you probably forgot that I exist. That’s totally fine—it’d be strange if you didn’t.

I’m going to start posting again. Maybe not as frequently, I’m leaning toward twice-monthly, but I’m dedicating myself to following through with these newsletters for the next year. I already have a couple months worth of stories banked, and I’ll be including little craft/fiction/indie publishing/industry essays at the bottom for anyone interested in hearing more.

If you don’t want my short stories and craft thoughts, please go to the bottom of this email and hit the unsubscribe button.

Seriously, go unsubscribe!

You won’t hurt my feelings!

I’m appearing in your inbox after two (three?) years of silence.

I deserve your unsubs!

If you’re still here, awesome. I’m excited to share more fiction with you (and other stuff—I think next edition will have some thoughts on burnout).

A little about me, since you definitely forgot:

My name’s Andrew, I went by DC for a while on here, but most people call me Drew. I’ve been self-publishing romance novels for just about 10 years, and I’ve had multiple books hit the top 100 of the Amazon store overall. I used to write poetry, but I don’t anymore, and I have an MFA from Notre Dame. I write high-end stereo equipment reviews for a really great magazine called The Absolute Sound. I also write short fiction and other stuff.

I want to share thoughts on craft and indie publishing and the publishing industry in general. I’ve been doing this professionally for a decade and I have feelings!! Those feelings can be ignored though—with the exception of this re-introductory post, the stories will always come up top

And finally, here is a story I wrote a few months back—it’s much longer than the typical works you’ll get from me. This one’s around 5k words, but the ‘normal’ length will be half that.

Thanks for sticking around, and I really hope you enjoy!

The Machine Still Turns

Every morning, Acolyte Initiate Owain attempted to resist the majesty of his faith and failed. It wasn’t in him not to worship, no matter how hard he tried. The prayer wheels glittered in the rising sun as mist burned off the metal hand rails, and Owain wanted to feel nothing more than the mundane churn of greased bearings spinning along posts. Instead, he caught a glimpse of the divine, which was unwelcome.

The divinity continued, his faith undiminished by time and repetition, as he moved down the walkway along the partially exposed exterior path. The side of the mountainous power station fell into a gleaming valley covered in trees. More natural beauty. It only made his belief stronger, and he tried not to look, but the stuff was all over the place. He marched along his route, spun dozens of wheels, murmured the prescribed words, and tried to remember that he’d memorized these prayers from a book only six months earlier, but that didn’t change a thing. He still felt it.

The wheels themselves were gorgeous. That didn’t help. Each had a smooth, polished metal exterior, cold to the touch, and reflected the natural vista in distorted, artistic swathes. His fingerprints marred the surface for moments before evaporating. The holy letters, signs, and symbols were carved into the interior, and Owain wasn’t allowed to know what they said. The uncertainty was part of the system. His god was a wind god, and if he was spinning wheels for gods of the sea, for example, his faith wouldn’t be as meaningful. They’d lose precious magic and so forth. The engineers had devised this scheme whereby the Initiates had no clue which wheel was sanctified to which god, meaning any wheel could be their own god’s prayer.

Rationally, Owain understood the trick, but a voice inside him wondered each time he spun the deceitful holy cylinders, and it was the same voice that wouldn't shut up about divine provenance and the beauty of all things. It made him believe. He hated that voice.

Faith was the power that drove the grinding machinery, and sometimes Owain wondered if his unwillingness only made his faith that much more potent. He moved down the line, and in spinning the prayers he manifested a small spark of magic, and the gears sent that sliver of illogic down the pneumatic tubes to be gathered in the great batteries beneath the temple complex, only for it to flow out along lines and cables, to get condensed into portable logic boards, and then dispersed throughout the empire. That was the product of Owain’s faith. Power for the world.

Other Initiates traversed the wheel line. He nodded to each and spoke to those he was familiar with. When he ran into Acolyte Initiate Travers, the pair of them stepped off the main path to take a break in the shade. Travers leaned her head back, her throat bobbing as she let out a long breath steaming into the air. She wore her hair long, right on the line toward improper, and somehow her white uniform robes were always rumpled, like she slept in them each night. But Travers was one of the longest-serving Initiates, having been at this power station for two whole years, and she knew every inch of every regulation like a sermon she’d prepared by heart. Most Initiates lasted six months on average. Owain had been there for five.

“Still believe?” she asked.

“Despite my best efforts.”

“You’ll get there.” She patted his shoulder. “I heard Jenander went cold yesterday.”

That surprised Owain. “He seemed so sincere.”

“You never know what’s going on under the surface.” Travers stretched her back and covered her mouth as she yawned. “You’ll get there eventually. This place always drains them.”

He wanted to ask how she did it. Two years of walking, spinning, and praying, only for any miracles her faith generated to drain into the great machinery of the state, and not once losing faith. She terrified and fascinated him all at once. What if he was like her and could continue on indefinitely? Would they keep him here until he couldn’t walk the paths anymore? A life spent in prayer, denied all meaning. Travers didn’t seem unhappy. Maybe it wasn’t so bad.

There were the Meditation Wards for after the wheels had turned enough, the Chanting Recesses, the Communal Sermons, and even some deeper mysteries Owain hadn’t been introduced to. He didn’t want to know what happened to the priests that worshipped through sacrifice, that denied their bodies, that embraced pain. Sub-basement Twelve was reserved for those pitiful few. Owain was limited by his deity’s requirements, which weren’t overly restrictive. He wandered the upper levels as long as that wandering was itself a kind of holy communion, and too bad for Owain, because his was. He returned to the wheels each evening, spun them one last time, and retired to his cell to recover, but not to pray.

It was in the small hours that he remembered his old life in the monastery back home. He was too young to know what Ivorth was like before the Region came, but he grew up in the sprawling complex with its prayer bowls and graven images of his lord the wind god Vethyerwyn. But even then, the Vethites were dying away, the priesthood shrinking, the faith dwindling, and by the time Owain came of age there were only a dozen of them huddled together in their chilly antechamber singing His praises and calling forth His miracles. The Region encouraged all religions, even going so far as to fund them, but that meant a constant struggle for adherents. Why pray to Vethyerwyn when some other god could heal sores and grow grain? What was the point of the Divine Wind?

A knock at Owain’s cell made him jump. He sat up and stared as his door opened. A lantern came first, blinding him, carried by a man dragging a cart. The wheels clattered on the stone floor.

“Don’t mind me,” the man said.

Owain’s eyes adjusted. “What’s going on?”

“Just here to collect the illogic is all.” He was middle-aged and paunchy. His robes were deep gray, meaning he wasn’t an Initiate anymore. They must’ve reassigned him to the Engineering department. His faith had failed him. Lucky guy.

He began fiddling with a blocky machine on the back of the cart. Long tubes snaked from it, and the man attached the ends to pegs on Owain’s bedframe. He hummed to himself as he worked.

“I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m supposed to be off duty.” Owain tried to squirm away but the man barely paid him attention.

“Got an alert on the logic boards. You’re having a crisis.”

“I’m not—what are you talking about?”

“Crisis of faith.” Once the tubes were all fastened, the man turned a few dials, flicked some switches, and the whole machine began to glow a warm orange and groan. “Pretend like I’m not here. Go ahead, lie back, keep on thinking about home or whatever it is that’s got you worked up.”

This was too much. Owain didn’t know what to say. He felt violated like the Region had implanted worms under his skin. He stared at the tubes, at the machine, and a cold dread filled him. Even in his private cell, he was monitored. They watched him all the time, desperate for any ounce of faith he could conjure. The Region was hungry, and here at Ecclesiastic Power Station Twelve, it must be fed.

“Get out,” Owain said softly, shaking.

“That’s good,” the man said, leaning back on his haunches and staring at some readings. He tapped at a glass screen. “Lovely, very lovely. You’re doing great.”

“Oh, god.”

“That’s the stuff,” the man said, nodding his big head.

“Please, I want you to get out.”

“Sorry, but a crisis of faith is also a kind of faith, and you know how things are here. Got to get even this stuff.” He looked up, eyes narrowed over the machine’s juddering. “You think I like this? Disgusting, if you ask me. Had it happen when I was in your spot. But these are the regulations, and we follow the regulations. Just lie back and pretend like I’m not here. I’ll sneak out when you’re asleep.”

Owain wanted to rip the tubes away. He wanted to thrash the man and scream. The machine continued its rumble like a second beat in his chest, and after a few moments of sweating and shaking, he lay back on his pillow, pulled his blankets to his chin, and squeezed his eyes closed.

The man was right. They followed regulations here. Owain despised them, but he was bound like everyone else. Travers seemed to understand better than most: the machine moved whether they wanted it to or not, and their individual protests wouldn’t stop the grinding. Owain couldn’t keep them from draining his crisis of faith the same way he couldn’t deny them his god’s magic. That was the deal he’d struck when High Priest Helmer had asked him to come here: serve his time, give the Region their miracles, and in return, the Region would keep Vethyerwyn alive. Their god would never starve. Their tradition would never die. But what kind of half-life was this place?

“Very good,” the man murmured from his spot near the machine, and Owain turned on his side, curling into a ball.

***

He still believed in the morning. That was the worst part of starting his day. The prayer wheels spun and danced in the sunlight and he liked the gentle rumbling noise they made along their greased post. The walk was easy; the view was gorgeous. He could feel his god Vethyerwyn. It was horrible.

“Heard you had a visitor last night.” Travers fell into step beside him. That was technically against regulation, but Travers seemed to exist outside their world. She was the example to ignore.

“How did they know?” he asked.

“Whole place is covered with logic boards.” She gestured in the air at nothing.

“The man that hooked up the machine said it happened to him.”

“They love the crisis stuff. Gets them a whole lot of juice, otherwise they probably wouldn’t bother. Too much work to monitor the alarms at all hours, right?”

“It wasn’t enough,” he said, not meaning the magic he’d produced for the Region.

Travers nodded like she understood. “Don’t worry. They’ll find some other way to bleed it out of you. Happens to everyone.”

“But not to you.”

“I’m a special case.” Her mouth pressed together in a mockery of a smile. “Go on, skip out on this morning. I’ll spin double for you. They won’t notice so long as their quotas are met.”

“Are you sure?”

“The first crisis is hard for everyone. I’m amazed you lasted this long, honestly. Go ahead, get something to eat.” She didn’t tell him to take a break, because there were no breaks in this place. The mere act of existing was a steady feed for the machine, a low-level drip of the miraculous.

But Owain took her up on the offer and was grateful for it. He retreated into the station and sat in the mess hall drinking decent tea and picking at thick slices of dark bread slathered in butter. It was Region food, not like what he grew up with, but good enough.

The day passed. Nothing terrible happened. He stayed calm at night and the man with the machine didn’t come back. The next day was the same, and the day after that, and each morning Owain woke with sunlight in his face praying that he wouldn’t believe anymore, but found the spark was still in him.

Until he received a summons during his morning wheel work a couple of weeks later. “They don’t hand those out for no reason,” Travers said, showing a bit of surprise. “Where are they calling you to?”

“Some meeting room on Sub-Basement Six.”

“Engineering,” she said and looked around as if the other Initiates might have overheard. “You better hurry.”

Owain felt a distinct unmooring as he descended the floors. The power station hummed around him, alive with the machinery that ran the state, crackling with magic. The byproduct of faith. How many like him had passed through this place? How many gods, how many traditions? He couldn’t begin to imagine. The power stations kept the religions of the world alive by gathering pieces of the lore that sustained the divinities themselves—but the price was the magic that gave substance to those faiths. How many tiny congregations had been faced with the choice to send a priest to the Region or to fade into history?

A young orderly met him once he reached Sub Basement Six. Owain was ushered into a small room with a table and four chairs, offered tea, and left alone. After a few minutes of silent, miserable staring at the wall, the door opened again, and a woman stepped in.

She wore glasses perched on her nose and a starched gray uniform. Her hair was cut short and worn straight. Several folders of papers were bundled in her arms. She was a Region woman just by the way she carried herself, as though she were both too important to notice anything around her and too busy to care.

“Acolyte Initiate Owain?” she asked before taking a seat.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “That’s me, although I don’t know why I’ve been called down here. I had that crisis of faith—“

“My name is Engineer Moscentina and this interview won’t take long.” She flipped open one of the folders, murmuring to herself. “I understand you’re the priest of a wind god?”

Owain nodded and looked down at the engineer’s hands. Her fingers were long and pale, and the nails were chipped and worn. Those were hands that made things. He hadn’t seen many actual engineers since coming to the power station—they kept to themselves and didn’t like to mingle with the priests, or so Travers had said—and he found Moscentina both fascinating and terrifying. The Region’s greatest minds worked to harness the powers that flowed behind the world. The powers he’d been taught were meant to remain wild and free. It was blasphemy, but when faced with extinction, the rules could be bent.

She shuffled some more papers, frowning at a diagram. “I’ve been told it has a certain kind of rite.”

“Vethyerwyn.”

Her eyebrows raised. “I’m sorry?”

“His name is Vethyerwyn. My god’s name, I mean.”

“Yes, right.” She looked back at the page. “This rite, I’ve heard it’s a kind of prayer. A sort of proto-spell?”

“I’m not sure which rite you mean. We have a lot of them. Songs, devotions, worshipful acts. Vethyerwyn believes—“

“There’s one in particular,” she said, cutting him off again. “I’ve been told it calls down a breeze? The sources are vague on how much of a breeze we’re talking.”

Owain went still. He felt cold all over. “There’s, ah, something like that,” he said, his mouth swollen like it was full of rocks.

“That’s quite useful, though my supposed superiors don’t think so. We’re always looking for ways to increase efficiency, and I’ve come up with this design—“

Owain could hardly listen. She showed him the drawings, the notations made in a precise hand, the specifications beautifully done and all to perfection, but his head was a rush of noise. He’d given the Region everything his religion could offer—everything but this. The most holy, the most sacred, the Divine Wind itself. It was their most important mystery. How the Region had learned about it, he didn’t have a clue. His people only performed the magic during their high holiday, and only once, to ring the chimes which called forth a new year and cleansed the world with Vethyerwyn’s grace.

This engineer’s diagrams were not holy, though they were lovely in their way. It was a giant windmill, from what he could tell, with prayer wheels attached to the top where the blades turned. A clockwork mechanism.

“If it functions as intended, we’ll have a nearly-automated system. Multiple wheels turned by the hand of a single Initiate. In theory, we could scale by compacting the prayers and filling available space, but I’m getting ahead of myself. I need you to explain how the magic works first.”

Owain’s head pounded. He couldn’t believe they were asking this of him, but of course they were. “I can’t tell you that.”

She looked surprised. “You can’t?”

“You don’t understand. I’ve given everything already. The Divine Wind, it’s the most holy of our beliefs, it’s fundamental to who we are as a people. It’s not a trick or some magic spell. It’s Vethyerwyn’s breath itself.”

Engineer Moscentina sat back, studying Owain with a pinched stare, and took off her glasses. She looked younger without them, likely around his own age, and exhaustion was etched into every inch of her posture. Bags hung under her eyes and wrinkles marked her forehead. She rubbed the bridge of her nose where the glasses had left red marks.

“Look, I get it,” she said with more patience than he expected. “This isn’t easy, but I’m trying to find a way to save everyone so much time and effort. And anyway, my superiors think this idea is absurd and won’t even work. My career is on the line here.”

“I understand, and I’m sorry for you, but—“

“Your contract was clear, Initiate Acolyte.” She put her glasses back on and sat straight. “You are to provide all hymns, prayers, rites, sacrifices, and mysteries of your religion. That’s how this works.”

“I know, but—“

“You think I enjoy sitting across from you prying away your most sacred beliefs? I don’t. I don’t at all. But this is how the system functions. These are the regulations. Now, you signed the contract, and you owe me.”

He opened his mouth, but only silence yawned from his throat. There were no protests anymore. Engineer Moscentina fetched a pen from her pocket. She held it poised over a blank page.

There was nothing he could say to stop this. She was right. He’d made the deal, and though he’d tried to keep one small piece of his religion away from these people, they’d have it anyway. Everything he held sacred was now theirs.

They’d keep Vethyerwyn alive—but in what state, he couldn’t imagine.

Owain watched her handwriting, her letters lined up like gears.

***

Life continued and the wheels spun. He chanted in supplication with the rest of them, and he still believed. He hated how much he believed. Several new Initiates arrived while more of the cohort he’d come in with were reassigned elsewhere, their faith drained. Travers remained unflappable. Owain sank into the routine, and he almost enjoyed the comfort of it. There was unlimited tea in the mess, good food at mealtimes, and he liked some of the other Initiates. They discussed theology at supper. Travers told funny stories about priests losing their religion in hilarious ways. He’d almost forgotten about giving over Vethyerwyn’s most sacred mystery until the laborers appeared in the courtyard several weeks later. The machine they assembled looked like a scaled-down version of what he’d seen in Engineer Moscantina’s notes.

She appeared to him one morning after the construction was finished. The engineer came out of a side door, stepped onto the wheel path, adjusted her glasses, and flagged him down. She looked uncomfortable. Her hair blew in the wind.

“I’d like to extend you an invitation,” she said, sounding very stiff. “The Autoprayer needs someone to turn the engagement mechanism. I was hoping it might be you.”

Owain felt sick at the idea. “Please, ma’am, I can’t. I really don’t—“

She stepped forward, cutting him off. “Will it work without you? Will the wind come if someone who doesn’t believe in your god engages the mechanism?”

“I don’t—I’m not sure.” Which was true. Based on what he’d seen of the contraption, she’d done something to the rite he’d given her, changed it in some fundamental way, and he had no idea what would happen with it now. “Only the faithful of Vethyerwyn ever called his Divine Breath.”

“Yes, well, that’s not really how magic works, is it?” She turned away. “If you change your mind, send me a note. The demonstration is tomorrow morning.”

“Ah, okay, ma’am. Good luck.” He grimaced at his words. Every part of him wanted this nightmare to fail.

The machine loomed for the rest of the day and into the night. He couldn’t sleep, but he also wouldn’t let himself linger over the theological ramifications of the thing. If he did, he might start having a crisis, and he couldn’t handle another night time visit. Instead, he closed his eyes and thought of his life back at the monastery among his people, chanting over the valley in the mornings, praying by the candles in the evenings, ministering to the poor and aiding the needy. He’d had a good, happy childhood, until the Region had annexed all the villages surrounding his home. Which meant his people had been annexed too, as they found out later. He’d been twelve years old when his world had changed. That was twenty years ago. He’d known the Region for longer than he’d lived without it.

They rang the bells early and called a general assembly. Owain shuffled in with the other tired Acolytes. He looked for Travers, but couldn’t spot her in the sea of white robes. The courtyard had a small platform erected beside the horrible machine, and four people stood on it. Engineer Moscentina was at the back, looking stiff and prim, her hands clasped in front of her. Two men and another woman stood in front of her, each in a gray uniform, starched and pristine.

A man called Chief Engineer Thosin gave a short speech. Owain couldn’t hear it. All he saw was the machine, and standing at the base by an activation mechanism that looked a lot like another prayer wheel, was Travers.

She seemed herself. Relaxed, a little aloof. If she knew what this thing meant to him, none of that showed on her face. It was a betrayal, but it was also a strange comfort. If someone was going to blaspheme his religion, if someone was going to sully the cleanest part of his soul, it might as well be Travers.

“Acolyte, please, give it a spin. Let’s see if this works, shall we?” Chief Engineer Thosin seemed as though he doubted anything would happen.

The crowd stood silent. Owain stared as Travers pressed her hand to the wheel and turned it with one sharp spin. It was a tiny gesture, dwarfed in the grandeur of a couple dozen Acolytes and the parade-stiffness of the Engineers. Owain prayed to himself, willing Vethyerwyn not to answer the most holy of calls.

The wind was cold. A breeze dragged through the fine hairs on his neck. He closed his eyes and felt the swelling in his throat. Vethyerwyn’s breath was always freezing as if descended from a mountain. It grew more intense, from a slight tugging at his skin, to a pull on his robes, until he heard the creaking of the machinery. Owain looked up, and the mill turned above them, spinning prayer wheels attached by cogs and flywheels, fifty or more. Travers seemed delighted and gave her mechanism another quick nudge.

Owain inwardly crumbled as his faith was confirmed. The wind blew, proving his god was watching and listening, proving that Vethyerwyn loved him and loved all living creatures and would give them his Divine Breath when they begged for him to cleanse their souls regardless of how they wanted to use it. Vethyerwyn was renewal and rebirth, and Owain hated himself as the miracle of His majesty unfolded. The wind howled bitter cold, and the wheels spun in great circles.

His faith had never been stronger than in that moment. Engineer Moscentina looked pleased.

***

Acolyte Initiate Owain stepped out onto the wheel walkway. The moon hung round and bright in the cloudless sky. He pulled his robes tightly around him as he shuffled forward, trying to be careful along the narrow path. He didn’t get far before a voice called out to him.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

It was Travers. She sat against the wall in the shadow of the overhang. Owain didn’t move. It wasn’t technically against regulations to be out of his cell in the middle of the night, but it was the sort of thing the Region would frown upon. But he moved over toward her anyway.

“I’ve come to put an end to my religion.”

She nodded as if she’d heard that one before. “Sorry about earlier.”

“You knew it was mine?”

“You’re always using wind metaphors during your little theology debates. I put it together.”

He grunted and shuffled closer. “But you did it anyway.”

“I did it anyway.”

“Why?”

She gave him a look, and he knew the answer already. It was the same reason he’d given away his religion’s secrets to Engineer Moscentina, the same reason he woke and spun the wheels each morning. He slid down and sat next to her, leaning his head back against the wall.

“That was a very intense line, you know,” she said after a long silence. “I’ve come to put an end to my religion.” She did a passable imitation of his accent. “Really had me impressed.”

“I wasn’t kidding.” He pulled his knees to his chest. “I want to get out of this place.”

“Why are you in such a hurry? What’s better out there?”

“At least out there, I’m not selling myself every day.” He was quiet and stared straight ahead. But he couldn’t keep it inside. “Why don’t they just take us? The priests, I mean. Why this elaborate system? If they need what we have, why not just force us to pray?”

“Because when the incentives are right, we happily give them everything they need. Even if we get barely anything in return. Why bother fighting? All that’s a big mess anyway. If they can build the world and bend it any way they want, eventually we’ll do what they’re asking without realizing it’s exactly what they wanted all along.”

“That’s almost worse,” he said, chin on his knees. “But also not worse. Which makes it terrible.” He didn’t know what he wanted to say.

Travers patted his back. “You get used to it.” She studied him for a second before nodding at the wheels. “What was your plan, anyway?”

“I was going to look inside of them,” he muttered, only now realizing how small that sounded.

But Travers ran a hand over her hair. “Not a bad idea. You can’t stop believing, right? So maybe you cheat the system a bit. Your wind god wouldn’t mind?”

“He’s pretty permissive.”

“Mine too.” She got to her feet and spread her arms wide. “Soleth the Destroyer, Queen of the Damned, Goddess of the Decaying Flesh.” She rolled her eyes and her hands fell to her sides. “It’s very dramatic. Anyway, she’ll love this. Come on.”

Travers helped him up. Together, they went down the path, unscrewing the top bolt that held each wheel in place. He lifted the body off and she held a candle while he peered inside. Wheel after wheel, he destroyed the illusion: none were to his god. They wouldn’t matter to him anymore.

Until a few hours later, when his fingers were stiff and numb, and his back and eyes both ached, he found an old prayer in his native language. Not even in a good spot: shoved in the back, away from the nice views.

He didn’t move for a while, reading and rereading those familiar, chest-aching words, hating how much he still loved them, and Travers let him stay right there until it was time to leave.

***

They came for him a couple of weeks later. What use was a priest without faith? He’d spun the wheels every morning, but made sure to skip the one that meant something. Now they’d take him away and assign him different work. This wasn’t winning, but it was the best he could do. He still believed. Maybe he could live with his religion somewhere else.

When he bundled himself in his robes and stepped out of the gates, following his escort, he felt the cold breeze against his skin and heard the creaking of the machine. Would his god be trapped in this place, stuck answering a call from the unfaithful? What would it mean for Vethyerwyn to manifest his power without the requisite faith? In fifty years, in a hundred, would anyone even know the textures of his faith? They’d never hear the thousand chimes echoing across the vast canyons of his home.

Owain didn’t know the answers, and the questions wouldn’t stop ringing through his hollow skull. Even if leaving was only a way to postpone the inevitable loss, he couldn’t remain in this half-existence alongside whatever was left of his god.

He had to believe that Vethyerwyn loved him and would want this for him. The wind was a symbol of that love, and it was awful.

As a sort of going away bonus, here are a few Reddit comment/shorts that I’ve posted from my weird novelty account /u/speculative--fiction. Don’t worry about context! There is none! Have a good August.

I lived near the beach for a few years next to this old woman that woke up every morning at five to go surfing. Each day without fail, she’d be out there on her board, riding waves like she was born to do it. She must’ve been seventy or eighty, but when she was in the water it was like the years fell away from her body.

I walked my dog late one night after the street lights went out and saw this strange orange glow burning down near the beach. I was afraid something bad was happening, so we went to check it out. My dog started growling as we trudged past the dunes and refused to go any further once we saw the sand. I tied his leash to a fence post and kept going until I saw the bonfire and the candles, hundreds of them spread all around. That old woman stood with her hands upraised next to the flames, the firefight flickering off her body, covered in a damp, shimmering wetsuit. I got closer as she raised a shell to her lips and drank some dark liquid, gulping it down her throat, the excess spilling down her chin as the waves broke hard against the surf. The sound was concussive, and the old woman’s body twisted and broke, her shoulder blades elongating, her neck cracking and twisting as she shrank down, dropping to the sand. I ran to her, but there was only a seal in her place, and it disappeared into the water before I could stop it. The flames roared as I lifted the shell to my lips and it smelled like coral and ancient kelp and tasted like the dirt and sand and salt, and when the endless water began to sing, I walked toward it and answered.

I traveled through the desert once a long time ago as part of a massive caravan. We slept in circled wagons at night in the middle of an endless sand desert, and by the third day of the brutal sun I thought we'd never make it back home, at least until the caravan leader stopped and took us to the edge of the pit.

There was no bottom, only endless black. He threw down ropes with buckets attached, the longest ropes I'd ever seen. It took them five minutes to finally stretch tight, and another twenty minutes to pull them back up, but the buckets were filled with the crispest, coldest water I'd ever tasted before. We spent the late afternoon dropping and hauling, and that night we drank like kings, slathering ourselves in pitwater, pouring it down our throats and over our chests beneath the startling white moonlight, until the first people began to change. It was subtle at first, a twisting of limbs, a darkening of skin, until one man vomited black bile and dropped to the ground, his abdomen stretching, the skin around his spine turning black and hardening, until he skittered away on all fours, a massive, chitin-covered beetle. One by one the caravan transformed, bodies distorted, twisted, flattened, smashed, and hardened, their screams lost in clicking mandibles, until it was my turn. As my torso broke and reformed, it felt like coming home after being caught in a rainstorm, and the last thing I saw was the caravan leader pouring a bucket of water over his head with a smile.

In the caves back behind my dad's house, there are deep springs fed by the mountains looming in the distance. Sometimes I'd go back there with my older brother and we'd go swimming in the swallows at the mouth of the cave, before the water turned black and got so deep I didn't think there was a bottom. My parents hated it, but so long as we didn't drift too close to the entrance, we were safe.

Except one morning, my brother saw something shiny out in the deeper water. It glinted off the sunlight and he started swimming toward it. I told him to stop, to turn back, but he ignored me and kept pushing closer and closer. I chased after him, begging him to stop, until he dove under the water and didn't come back up. I waited for what felt like hours, and soon the bubbles disappeared the ripples spread out to nothing. I screamed for my parents then went swimming after him and dove under, not thinking clearly. The water was so cloudy down below and there was barely any sunlight in the shadows of the cave mouth, but I saw him at the very bottom, struggling as hard as he could against a fish the size of a large dog with shiny green scales and big round eyes and massive waving antennas. It had my brother's arm in its mouth and was tugging, tugging, as he struggled toward the surface. I swam at the fish and yanked on its antenna hard enough to make the thing open its mouth, and my brother swam away, breaking toward the air with big gasping breaths. I followed him and we splashed out of that pool as fast as we could. We never went in the water again after that.

I found something like this in my grandfather's basement a few years back. He had crates filled with sawdust and straw stacked against the back wall and water would leak through the cracks in the bricks during heavy rain. Mold bloomed all over that corner and the whole place smelled like musty bread and old rotten plants. One night I went down there during a storm to move those boxes away to try and keep them dry so they wouldn't keep rotting, but one of the stacks was completely stuck. I yanked hard, over and over again, but it wouldn't budge. My feet were damp from standing in puddles and I felt like my lungs were on fire from huffing spores, but I wanted to help my grandfather, so I kept trying.

Eventually it broke away in a sudden lurch and I fell backwards. Muddy water covered my back as I climbed to my feet and swung my lantern toward the wall. An enormous colony stared out at me, tiny blossoms of green and blue and black, some with strange eye-like formations that seemed to blink and shy away. I had the sudden urge to get closer, and I knelt down heedless of the filth, and thin, gossamer tendrils curled out toward me in small, twisting strands, and I reached out to touch them, mesmerized by how they moved in the lantern light, twirling like fireflies or sea creatures, so deeply black and swirled with impossible greens that it was almost beautiful, and I opened my mouth to welcome them.

My grandfather found me wrapped with the mold tendrils lovingly around my body, their spores leaking up my nose and into my throat and deep into the soft tissue of my lungs. He hacked away at them and spoke his words of power, burning them to ashes, and I screamed as the mold released me. I still have trouble breathing from the scarring and I miss the warm, gentle embrace of the colony, and maybe one day I'll go back to them and be welcomed like a brother.

I saw my first tesseract when I was just a boy standing in my father's workshop. He drew the summoning sigils in his exacting hand across the walls and spoke the words in a clipped accent I didn't recognize. The tesseract fizzled into the center of the room, warping the wooden floors beneath it, and ghostly emanations sliced along the walls in long shards of light and blackness. My skin prickled with electric excitement and all the small hairs of my body stood on end. I reached out for the twisting, green-gray impossibility, the null-space of non-shape, but my father held me back. "You won't like what's inside," he said, his eyes dark and hooded, his face lit up with a bleak resignation.

I learned the words and the sigils through years of effort and blood. On my father's death bed, his body emaciated beyond repair, his fingernails long and twisted, his hair gray and thin as silk, he begged for one last glimpse of the beyond. I drew the circles, marked the perimeter, and chanted until the tesseract appeared in a twisting miasma of bone-deep groans and twisting improbabilities. My father stood from his bed and lumbered toward the glow, his hands outstretched, and for one moment I thought he'd pull back, but he plunged himself forward to his elbows, his hands and forearms twisting and shattering into non-being. I caught his look of ecstasy and terror as he continued to plunge, body changing, unbecoming into before, until the tesseract was all that was left of him.

And that’s it! Those are just a sampling of the comments I posted over the last few months, you can read the rest of them on my Reddit profile at reddit.com/u/speculative--fiction. Hopefully they’re entertaining. See you in September! -DC

“I never said you were stupid.” Heri leaned her elbows on her knees in the shade of a big oak tree. Sweat dripped down her forehead and drenched her dark button-down shirt and tight trousers. The other workers were scattered across the field in similar positions, trying to hide from the mid-morning sun.

“You implied it.” Kater squeezed the last remaining drops from his water skin into his mouth.

“I’m only saying that believing in ghosts is dumb. I’m not saying you’re dumb, but that’s a dumb thing to do.”

“Splitting hairs. You’re calling me stupid.”

Heri sighed and threw her hands up. “Fine, okay, maybe I’m calling you stupid. But seriously Kater, this whole project is insane.”

Kater couldn’t argue with that. He stretched his legs then looked out over toward the slopes and trees that grew up along the ridgeline. It was dotted with natural caves, and some of them went fairly deep into the earth, deep enough that most folks wouldn’t explore them.

There were rumors about those caves. Screaming sounds, human voices, apparitions in the night. The locals all believed they were infested by the supernatural and stayed far away.

Kater figured if he were a ghost, he wouldn’t want to haunt a bunch of boring caves.

“Flooding them seems a little overboard, I’ll give you that,” he said.

Heri gave him a look. “No kidding. How many men are working on this, do you figure?”

Kater shrugged, did a quick scan of the workers. “Dozens, but that’s good, right? Even if the job’s dumb, at least it’s a job. Lord Baron Devon Drogni pays.”

“Fine, alright, you can be mercenary, but I like to work jobs that have actual purpose, you know? Not flooding some stupid cave system all because the local Baron’s superstitious.”

Kater smiled and got to his feet as the foreman barked the end to their break. “How about this. If I can find some proof that those caves are filled with ghosts, will you feel better?”

Heri grinned back and that made Kater’s stomach twist. It always did. Her face brightened, and her dark eyes sparkled as Kater helped pull her to her feet, and she leaned toward him with raised eyebrows. “If you do that Kater, I’ll believe in a lot more than this stupid project.” She stalked off to join the others as the group moved toward the nearby river with shovels and picks and boards to help divert the water.

Kater watched her hips move, watched her midnight black hair sway slightly as stray pieces fell from her tight bun. One day he’d ask her to marry him, and she’d probably say no, but at least he’d ask.

For now, he’d prove ghosts exist. Maybe he’d get another smile.

#

The caves were kind of creepy. Probably not haunted, but still, creepy.

Kater picked his way down a tight tunnel. Stalactites and stalagmites jutted from the ground and the ceiling all around him. Kater’s hand brushed something damp and he shivered as he raised his lantern high to keep the light from blinding him.

There were bats, a family of sleeping opossums, evidence of bears, but no ghosts. Kater tried to summon them: he shouted out sad things, like a child’s lost shoe, or like the feeling you get at the end of a particularly good song, but no apparitions appeared.

Kater climbed deeper. He had experience playing in caves—as a kid he used to explore a system near his home village. Those were good days, getting lost in the dark, fearless and heedless of the dangers all around him, focused only on getting as deep as he could, as lost as he waned. It was a shame, flooding this place.

Kater shimmied through a tight passage barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. It was always a risk, pushing between like that—if he happened to get stuck, there’d be no rescue. Heri knew he was down there, but not where he was in particular. But Kater had always been very bendy, and stepped into another twisting tunnel.

But this time, he heard something.

It was strange. He didn’t know what to make of it—there was like an odd wailing echoing off the rocks. His heartrate picked up and Kater started forward, going slowly, picking his way over the rocks. The sound came again, louder this time.

Ghosts and goblins. Monsters in the deep.

The cave was brighter than it should’ve been and shadows flickered around the rocks up ahead in patterns that didn’t make sense.

He closed the hood on his lantern, dimming the light as much as he could without letting the flame burn out.

He could still see. Which meant there was a fire around the bend.

The noise resolved into voices. He couldn’t pick out the words, but it was a low chatter between several speakers. At the junction ahead, Kater paused and looked around the corner, and stared into a large open chamber with high ceilings lit by burning lanterns and torches and several bonfires scattered throughout.

People camped in the middle. He stared, shocked at how many there were—ten, twenty, fifty even. Tents sprouted everywhere. Children ran in a tight pack after a bouncing wicker ball while men fixed a broken wooden slat on a leaning shack. Women stood in tight clusters sewing, cleaning, chatting to each other. Two old ladies strolled dangerously close to Kater, talking in a language he didn’t understand.

It was a town. No, it was a city.

The caves weren’t haunted.

They were occupied.

He turned away. He didn’t know these people, didn’t know why they were living down there or what they wanted, but it didn’t matter.

If Heri and the others diverted the river, all these people would die.

He scrambled back the way he came, squeezed through the narrow passage, and ran stumbling back to the surface.

#

“It’s not haunted,” Kater said breathlessly.

Heri’s eyebrows rose up. “Is that what you’ve been doing?

“There aren’t any ghosts. I checked.”

“Okay. No kidding.”

Kater grabbed her hands tightly, trying to make her understand. “But Heri. There are people down there.”

Her eyebrows knitted. “What do you mean, people down there?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but there’s a little settlement of them. There are children in those caves. Families, old men and women. It’s a little city.”

Heri’s mouth worked. Kater held her hands tightly in his own, his palms sweating, feeling the knots of her calluses along her fingers. Her throat bobbed and she glanced to the side where the foreman was shouting at some workers to hurry up.

The job was nearly done. Kater had waited until the last day to explore the caves, which wasn’t a great idea in retrospect. Boards were set up along the channel they dug, and all the workers had to do was pull them up and the great river would begin to flow into those caves.

And eventually, it’d wash away the people living in them.

“We have to do something,” Kater said. “We can tell the foreman, maybe even the Baron himself—"

But Heri grabbed him and held on tight. “They know.”

Kater stared at her. “What do you mean, they know?”

“Those people are the reason the Baron wants to flood those caves. He’s just using the haunted thing as an excuse.” Her eyes were wide as she scanned the trench. Kater felt her hands tremble. “We helped him kill them.”

“Not yet, we didn’t. We can do something. I can go back in and warn them—“

“The foreman’s going to pull those boards soon. You don’t have time.”

Kater could see the children playing, the men working on that shack, he could smell the life in that cavern—the animals and straw and bodies.

He couldn’t let them die.

“I have to try.” He pulled from her and began to run.

“Damn it, Kater.” Heri caught up with him, matched his stride.

Kater reached the cave entrance. One of the diggers gave him a weird look, but Kater got weird looks a lot. He stepped inside and nobody stopped him.

What did it matter, one less worker to pay?

But Heri followed him into the dim.

“What are you doing?” Kater asked.

“If you’re going to be a stupid hero, then I’m coming with you.”

“It’s dangerous, Heri. Go back.”

She gave him an uncertain smile but pushed past and into the darkness.

Kater clenched his jaw, but lit the lantern and followed after her.

#

It didn’t take long to find the narrow passage again. Heri went first and made it through without issue. Kater wriggled after and stepped out into the tunnel. “They’re close,” he said and dimmed the hood. “Last time, I could hear them around now.”

They stood in silence, straining to listen. But there was no sound and no light playing on the rocks ahead.

Kater was positive they were in the right spot. He took a few steps forward, but the cavern was as quiet as a tomb.

“Are you sure about this?” Heri touched his arm. “We can go back, you know. We still have time.”

“They’re right up ahead.” Kater opened the lantern again to keep himself from tripping in the dark.

There should be light. Before, there was so much light and sound and life spilling into the tunnels. But now, the place was empty.

He felt Heri close against his back, her fingertips brushing his shoulder.

The tunnel turned and opened into the massive chamber.

And it was empty.

Kater walked forward, his mouth hanging open.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said softly.

“Are they close to here?” Heri asked. “Maybe we took a wrong turn.”

But no, they were in the right spot. The ceiling, the shape of the space, it was the same as before. He looked around, searching for something, any sign that he wasn’t going insane—

And there, twenty feet away. He walked over and kicked at ancient wooden boards, mostly rotted through. “Look at this.”

Heri joined him and frowned. “I think it might’ve been a hut or something. Look at how the boards were joined.”

Kater felt his stomach lurch. There’d been people, dozens of them, and so much light. He found more signs of life: old fires, scraps of clothing, more wood, a nearly-complete tent, a set of tools, a small wicker ball.

“I swear they were here.” His voice sounded distant, swallowed by the stone and the darkness.

“Looks like they’re gone now.” Heri kicked through another pile of wood and rubble. Several pairs of rotted boots tumbled away. “Are you sure you saw people?”

“And light and buildings. Heri, they were down here, living in this place.” He gestured all around.

But it was only a graveyard now.

None of this made sense. He saw it, he felt it. He smelled them.

As he stepped toward the center of the room, a strange trickling sound bounced off the walls.

Neither of them moved for several seconds. Then the trickle turned into a gush and water lapped against Kater’s feet.

Heri groaned as she ran back the way they’d come. By the time she reached the far entrance, she was splashing through water. “They released the dams.”

“How much water’s coming?” Kater looked across the cavern toward the far side.

“I don’t know. It’s flooding fast, though. Is there another way out?”

Kater ran to the opposite side—but there was no other exit. Nothing large enough for them, at least.

“It’ll take a while to fill the caves,” he said. “We can try to climb back out through the water. Maybe we can make it.” But he didn’t think so. The closer to the entrance they got, the more water they’d have to fight through. They had no food, no way to make a fire, no way to survive.

Heri’s face was stricken in the lantern light and Kater wanted to scream.

He saw them, the people. He saw them gathered and alive.

Heri moved closer to him and slipped her hand through his.

“I should be really mad at you right now,” she whispered. “But I’m too scared to call you stupid.”

“I swear they were here.”

“I believe you.” She leaned her head on his shoulder.

They stood as the water rose up around their boots, washing away the evidence of lives long past, of the bones and the broken shelters and the scattered tools and the way back out.

ps, This story started with a prompt about birds. There are no birds here! I don’t know where this came from. Anyway, click that heart/like if you got this far and hit the share button. I really appreciate everyone reading and commenting, seriously makes my day! Have a great week. - DC

“Honestly, I hope so, because we’re in such a sketchy neighborhood right now.”

“It’s not that bad. You just have to know where to go.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m pretty sure we passed a dead body back there.”

“Sleeping, not dead. Probably.” I frowned over my shoulder.

She slipped a hand through my arm and leaned against me as we walked, her bright blue eyes smiling at me like I was some kind of idiot, and I felt like I could never do this again—find someone else that would put up with all my idiosyncrasies and flaws like Bell did.

We met online. Most of my relationships started online. It wasn’t that I was bad in person—I could be charming if I wanted to be, but it took me a while to build to it, like a machine that needed priming and a lot of time to warm up. Things clicked with Bell right away, and we spent hours typing back and forth, then texted all that following day, until we finally met up for a nerve-wracking lunch. Now I’m always slightly surprised when she lets me kiss her, and that she doesn’t seem horrified every time I show up at her apartment to pick her up for another date.

“I know soup sounds weird, but trust me,” I said as we got closer to the place. “It’s like the most heavenly stuff in the world, and the owner’s this green-skinned Tabak guy that’s always smoking and he’s really nice. I used to come here a lot and watch baseball with him.” I didn’t add that I was in a bad place back then—depressed and close to giving up.

“I’ll eat whatever at this point,” Bell said, putting a hand on her stomach, “so long as we get there soon. Otherwise I might have to trap a feral cat.”

I looked at her, mock-horrified. “You can’t eat a street cat.”

“Of course not. I’d train it to catch rats for me. I’m not a disgusting freak.”

I laughed and made one final turn. Bell was right about the neighborhood: half the buildings were still bombed out from the war, rotting husks of charred wood and brick, testaments to lost lives, monuments for the missing dead. Most businesses were still boarded up, and I didn’t know if they’d ever come back.

The soup shop was tucked back beneath an awning. The last time I was here, comforting yellow light leaked out from behind two big windows covered with blinds and a shabby red-painted door. The whole place smelled like food, rich and delicious, and warmth radiated onto the sidewalk.

Except now the place was all boarded up.

Bell hesitated, looked at me strangely, then stepped forward. “You’re sure this is the right spot?” She grabbed at the board on the front door. She tugged, but it was stuck tight. “Looks like it’s been shut down for a while. Did you come here before the war?”

“No,” I said softly, shaking my head. I’d eaten there a couple weeks earlier, and I was positive I was in the right place—across the street was an old bank, the facade a crumbled mess. “I don’t understand.”

Bell put her hands on her hips. “Well, you dragged me out into the Melt and now I’m starving, so we’re getting in there and finding something to eat.”

“Hold on,” I said, but Bell leaned into the board. She pried it loose after a short struggle and tossed it onto the ground. She wiped her hands on her jeans and grinned at me.

“Now let’s go see what’s up in this place.”

She pulled at the door. I wanted to shout at her, to make her stop. Something was wrong here, something was very wrong, but she stepped inside and disappeared into the dark.

I forced myself to follow. The smell of a deep, animalistic fungal bloom hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold. Bell pulled her shirt up over her nose and laughed at me as I stood there staring around with my lips pulled back over my gums

It looked like it should, only rotten and ancient. The small counter, the television in the corner, the pots and pans and the stove, everything was covered in dust and mold and a thin layer of rancid moisture.

Bell peered into the dim kitchen. “I have to say, for a fifth date, I’m not very impressed. I hope you’re not giving up already.”

“I think we should get out of here.” The urge to panic and run bubbled up so intensely that I had to grip the doorframe to keep from bolting.

Bell didn’t seem to notice though. “There’s a back room, let’s check it out.”

“Seriously, it’s dangerous and I’m pretty freaked out.”

But Bell climbed over the counter and dropped down on the other side. She turned to me and leaned her elbows on the greasy, stained wood, and waggled her eyebrows. “Hey handsome. Looking for something to eat?”

The knot in my gut loosened a touch at her goofy smile. I stepped closer and glanced over—the same sports posters on the wall, the same stack of crates piled next to an ancient refrigerator—and took a sudden deep breath to try and calm down.

“Come on, let’s get it over with.” I hopped over and landed heavily on the far side. The floorboards creaked and I thought they might flex and snap for one wild moment.

Bell’s hand grabbed my arm again. “Easy there. You look kind of pale.”

“I remember all this stuff. The owner sat over there and we talked about the Phillies. He was a really nice guy.”

Bell frowned at me and shook her head. “A lot of weird stuff happens in Keston. Maybe you’re misremembering or something?”

“I swear it was two weeks ago. This place was open and warm and the soup was incredible and—“

And it saved my life, coming here. For a while, it was the only place that felt like home, but I couldn’t explain that to Bell, couldn’t make her understand how a stupid, run down soup shop in a bad neighborhood with an owner that listened and nodded and smiled and talked to me like an equal kept me from climbing the Canton Bridge and throwing myself down into the black, choppy water.

“Come on.” She grabbed my hand gently and tugged me toward the back. “Let’s see what’s here then go get dinner.”

The back kitchen was even worse than the front. The floor was soaked and soft, and the prep tables, counters, burners, and cooking equipment were covered in a dense layer of black and green slime. Bell pinched her nose, making a face. It was dark, the only light coming from somewhere up above—hole in the roof, most likely.

I stepped forward as if drawn into the space, but Bell hesitated and kept behind me. It was small, almost cramped, and I could imagine the owner cooking in the big pots during better days, before the war left the world a damaged ruin.

I reached out to touch a ladle left cross-wise on a table when I heard the sound.

It was a strange, high-pitched whine, followed by a skittering like multiple legs through garbage. I froze and looked up at the far wall as something black and covered in fine hair descended from the ceiling, suspended on a shimmering gossamer rope.

The spider was bigger than me. Its multitude of eyes blinked out from its impossibly dark body, its legs curled in around the web that sprouted from its lower half. It tilted its head, watching me carefully, mandibles whirring like it wanted to say something.

“I didn’t think you’d come back here.”

I flinched at Bell’s voice. It was her, but it wasn’t her—she sounded flat, emotionless. I looked over my shoulder and she stood there, eyes slack and staring sightless, shoulders rounded and hunched, mouth open and dull. Her head tilted slowly but she didn’t look at me and didn’t move.

“Bell,” I whispered, hissing her name. “Get out of here. Move really slowly. I’m coming.”

But she didn’t move. Her eyes met mine—and nothing was there. It felt like she looked past me, or through me, or wasn’t looking at all.

“You don’t need me anymore,” she said in that flat affect again. “Go home, Jason. You don’t need me.”

“What are you talking about?” I took a step back from the spider, my gut twisted in terror, my hands trembling, my feet tingling and numb. “We need to get out of here.”

“You know it was me, Jason. You know who I am. Look at me.”

I stared at her for one agonizing second—I didn’t want to look, god, please, I didn’t want to—then turned to the spider.

It dangled horribly. It released the web and spread its legs wide—and still hung in the air.

“You don’t need me anymore.” Bell’s voice, close to my neck. “Go home and do not come back here. You know me now, and I know you. I enjoyed our time together, but now our times is done. You don’t need me anymore. Go home, Jason.”

I opened my mouth to scream but Bell’s hand clamped down on my wrist. I stared at the spider as Bell pulled me into the main room. She stumbled, like she’d lost control of her legs, and I had to carry her over the counter. She groaned something horrible, clicking sounds in the back of her throat, and I heard the spider back in that room weaving its web and moving its mandibles, its too-many eyes following, its impossible body too thick and covered in swirling hairs. I kicked the front door until it banged to the side and dragged Bell out onto the sidewalk.

I dragged her along until she began to walk on her own, and it took a few more blocks before she stopped and rubbed at her eyes with both hands.

“Oh man,” she said softly then laughed. “God, I have the biggest headache.”

I looked down at her, on the verge of throwing up in the gutter. “Bell? Are you okay?”

She grinned at me. “Totally fine, just a headache. Why are you looking at me like you’re afraid I might fall over?”

“The spider— you were talking for it, and—“

She frowned. “What are you talking about?”

I clamped my mouth shut. She stared back at me, and it was Bell again, definitely it was her.

“Nothing,” I said softly, and felt the creep of it again my shoulders, moving down my spine. I took her hand in both of mine and held it tight. “Sorry, nothing, just a game.”

“Right. Cool game, but I’m still starving. So where’s this soup shop you keep talking about?”

“Let’s try somewhere else, actually. There’s a pizza place near here that’s not too bad.”

“At this point, I’ll eat anything.” She leaned against my side and we began to walk again.

I didn’t look back toward the bombed-out buildings and their leaking guts, toward the spider and its web, but I knew it was there and watching, could sense it on the edge of my awareness like the feeling of a warm shop after a rainstorm and baseball on TV and good conversation and home.

ps, This grew out of a Reddit comment post I made on my u/speculative--fiction account. The original version’s pretty creepy, but I like this one better. As always, click that heart/like button to let me know you read this far and share it! Have a good week. - DC

Another light bobbed toward him from the opposite direction.

“You’re late,” Jain said as Fion came into view.

Fion threw a goofy smile. Ruffled dark hair, bright white teeth, stained and tatters scavenging clothes, boyish and handsome. “You don’t mind going through the shit.”

“It’s faster.” Jain turned away and looked down the tunnel mouth. “You ever gone this deep before?”

“Never.” Fion stood next to him and the pair didn’t speak for a long moment. Jain glanced at his best friend, at those dark eyes and the slope of his nose, and felt a shot of anger he struggled to keep under control, but if Fion noticed, he didn’t mention it.

“Let’s get moving then.” Jain descended and Fion hurried behind him.

The floor sloped sharply then turned to the left in a slow spiral. “It’s like the bottom of the ocean down here,” Fion complained. The air was heavy and damp, and the walls seemed to ooze with humidity.

“Keep an eye out for something useful.” The tunnels beneath Verash were old and some still held artifacts that might be worth serious money at market. Most scavengers were afraid to come this deep—the oldest parts of the underground were dangerous and crumbling, and cave-ins weren’t unheard of, but Jain had a baby on the way nod needed the cash, and Fion probably felt too guilty to let Jain come down alone.

Not that Jain could say for sure what Fion did and didn’t feel.

“How’s Inge?” Fion’s voice echoed forward as the path leveled off and they moved down a long hallway. They checked each small niche and room, kicking through rubble, finding mostly trash.

“Starting to get to her,” Jain said. “Being pregnant isn’t easy.”

“So I hear.”

“But she won’t complain. Won’t even take any time off her feet.” He felt a strange surge of pride, his beautiful wife, her stubborn pride.

“Doesn’t surprise me.”

“Are you still seeing that tavern girl? What was her name?”

“Hiliza. No, not anymore.” Fion hesitated as they passed beneath an old arch with faded carvings.

Jain tightened his grip on the lantern. “You could consider settling down, you know. She was a good one. Liked you, anyway.”

“Put up with me, you mean. And she only liked me for the same reason all the others like me—fun for a night but no good for a life.”

That was Fion’s favorite saying. Jain used to think it was funny and clever, but now it twisted his guts.

More rooms broke off from the main hallway. Ahead, the passage continued to drop down. They were in the ancient ruins, the layer under the underlayer, the sewers for the old city. Verash was a trash heap, an accumulation—it’d been built, over and over, on top of its previous incarnations. Once, this could’ve seen the light of day.

“Inge thinks it’s time to give up on all of that, you know.” Jain looked over his shoulder. Fion held back a few feet, looking into the side rooms. “You’d be happier with someone steady.”

“I’m not so sure about that. Are you happier, now that you’re married?”

“I know that when I get back to the surface, I’ll have Inge waiting for me. That’s more than you can say.”

Fion’s face twisted for a moment. “I’ve got plenty waiting.”

“You’ve got a single ratty room in the back of a run-down tavern, two changes of clothes, and a drinking problem. You gamble all your money away and sleep with whatever’s willing.” Jain walked faster.

“What’s your problem?” Fion kept pace. His footsteps were hurried and sharp.

“You’ve been like this as long as I’ve known you, ever since we were kids. You think it’s cute to be lazy and directionless and you get away it, gods know how. How long do you think scavenging the sewers will support you?”

“I don’t see you getting a job anytime soon.”

“I’m working on it.” And he was—Jain planned on begging Inge’s uncle for a position in his restaurant.

They passed another arch and the path began to spiral again, dropping precipitously. Jain walked recklessly fast and Fion was nearly jogging to keep up.

“That’s what you’re mad about? You think I should get a job? I remember you saying labor didn’t define a person.”

“I remember you not being such a waste.”

“That’s definitely not true.”

They reached the bottom of the spiral. Jain hurried into a wide, open chamber, echoes bursting off the walls and the floor—and came to a sudden stop. Fion clambered up against him, and both men stood in silence, staring at a wide, circular pool of chalky blue water, perfectly still in the darkness. It was enormous, big enough that their weak lantern light didn’t reach the distant shore.

Jain had never seen anything like it.

Fion walked past him and knelt. “What the hell is this?” he asked softly, reaching his fingers out.

Jain wanted to kick him in the back and shove him under. He could almost feel Fion struggling, fighting against the thick liquid as Jain held him beneath the surface until there were only bubbles, then nothing.

His friend would drift away into this ancient, forgotten pit and nobody would ever find him again.

Jain turned away, hands shaking. In the gloom, a shape stood to the side, a few feet from the water’s edge. Jain walked to it and sucked in a breath—it was a statue of a woman, slightly damaged, but otherwise perfect.

“Fion.” Jain reached out to touch the stone.

Verash was dotted with ancient fountains and each of them held their own god. Most of the statues were broken or weathered beyond recognition, but this one was pristine. He guessed it was older than older, and might’ve stood in its own fountain once, thousands of years ago.

Her painted green eyes stared sightlessly from her handsome face. Her simple dress fell in folds, and her hair was detailed enough to look real, thick and draped down her back. Her right hand was pressed against the soft swell of her pregnant belly, and her left was held up in the air. Her fingers were long and gorgeous.

“That’s one of them, isn’t it?” Fion stood a few feet back, his mouth open.

“It’s got to be.” Jain touched the goddess’s cheek. “But what’s she doing down here?”

“I don’t know, but it looks like she’s pregnant.”

Jain took a step back then turned. Fion stared at him, dark eyes, mop of hair, boyish smile getting older every day.

“I know it was you.” Jain barely whispered but the words echoed off the water and the stone walls and filled the space around them.

Fion’s smile faltered. “You know what’s me?”

“I know it was you,” he said again, gripping his lantern harder. “Inge and the baby. I know it was you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But his smile was gone.

Jain stepped toward his friend. The man he knew was dead.

“When we get to the surface, you won’t come around anymore. When the baby’s born and it’s got your eyes and your nose, you won’t say a word. You’ll make jokes if anyone asks and smile and do your charming bullshit, but you won’t come to visit, you won’t pay your respects.”

“Jain—“ Fion started, but Jain stepped closer, inches away, his lips pulled back in rage.

“You won’t speak to her. You won’t look at her. That baby is mine, do you understand? That’s my baby.”

“Jain, let me explain.”

“She already explained.” Inge crying in their small bedroom, her shoulders hunched and shaking. She told him everything, and he’d forgiven her because he loved her, and because Fion could never raise that baby, and because the baby hadn’t done a thing to deserve any of this.

Fion’s face went slack and he stared at the floor. “It was only once. I was drunk, she was drunk, it was a mistake.”

“I know all about your mistakes. You won’t come around. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

The anger left him in a rush.

Jain’s legs ached and his chest burned from their long trip into the darkest pit of the underworld and now all he wanted to do was climb out and kiss Inge’s belly and tell her how much he loved her.

He shoved past Fion and walked toward the entry arch.

“Wait,” Fion said. Jain hesitated, looking back. “The goddess.” Fion raised his lantern. “We can’t just leave her down here. I mean, something like this, in this sort of condition, it’s got to be worth a fortune.”

“Leave her alone,” Jain said. “You’ve done enough already. Just leave her.”

Jain left the chamber, and in the corner of his eye he thought he saw a pile of rags and a tumble of bones, but maybe it was his imagination, or maybe it was this place, the cistern of horrible water, that impossible goddess standing all alone beside it, and his best friend, dead to him now, buried back there in the sediment of the city and the years and the piled resentment.

If Fion called for him to wait, Jain didn’t hear it, and didn’t care either way.

ps, Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to share and hit that heart button to let me know you got down this far. Have a great weekend. - DC

She lifted Persala up to her lips.

“We came a long way, Pers. Don’t go quiet on me now.”

The fine black pen felt warm in her fingers. It was the length of Millie’s palm, midnight dark, with a small gold band around the middle. She let the sun brush off the tip and felt something vibrate inside.

Still here.

Relief hit Millie harder than she’d expected. Pers hadn’t talked much during their trip, but now her voice sounded like fresh cotton along the back of Millie’s neck.

“You holding up okay in there?” Millie started her trek down the mountainside toward the skypit. “I know it’s boring, stuck in my pocket.”

I’m keeping busy. There’s a lot to do in here, you know.

“Really?”

No, Mills. I’m a pen. What do you see?

Millie smiled to herself. That was Pers again, sounding more like herself. “The pit’s enormous,” Millie said. “Like bigger than anything I’ve ever seen, and the cliff walls are smooth like they were dug there on purpose.”

Nobody knows where the skypit comes from, so maybe you’re right.

“How about we go find out?”

Lead the way.

Millie picked up her pace.

#

It took Millie months to track down her first lead. The old man lived at the edge of Ult, a massive city that crawled up the side of a mountain. He said there were steps into the skypit, hidden for hundreds of years. That led her to a monastery in Avar on the edge of a cliff covered in thick snow. The monks there had maps and were willing to let her copy them out—so long as she showed them Pers.

Once she knew about the steps, and she had the maps to find them, it was only a matter of traveling across the known world to the skypit itself.

You know what I miss most about having a body? Pers asked as Millie walked along the edge.

“Eating,” Millie said. “Oh, or maybe that first stretch when you wake up in the morning. Gods, that feels good.”

I miss touching people. I didn’t appreciate how much I liked touching people until I couldn’t anymore.

“I miss touching you too, Pers.” Millie bit down on her cheek. Even after all these years, the pain was a wound that wouldn’t heal over.

I also miss getting so drunk that even dancing’s fun.

Millie laughed as she paused to check her map. “Remember Cam’s wedding? You knocked back six big cups of wine then spun me around all night.”

Literally spun you. I thought it was funny to try and make you dizzy.

“I was so annoyed.”

Until I got you back home. Then you loved me again.

Millie’s smile was tight. She was close—on her left was a large rock formation in the shape of an open hand, and beyond that should be an opening in the cliff wide enough for a person to wiggle through. Then down onto a set of winding stairs, and into the darkness.

I’m just saying, I miss touching people. I miss touching you. Are you still going to love me when I have a body again?

“I don’t know. I mean, I have been dragging your stupid butt around for years now trying to find a way to bring you back.”

Pers went quiet as Millie found the opening. It was a jagged hole in the rock and she could just make out a landing below. She dropped her pack down first and it landed with a dull thud.

I know I’ve said it a hundred times over the years, but I am sorry, you know. You should’ve sold me a long time ago.

“It’s okay,” Millie said softly. “We’re almost there. Just hold on.”

She gripped the edge, slipped over, dangled above the drop, then let herself go.

#

The stairs were wide, smooth, and switched back on themselves along the edge of the pit, descending into dark. Black on the left, then black on the right, over and over again.

How deep are we now?

Millie squinted up. “I’m honestly not sure.” The sunlight was a pinprick.

Sweat trickled down her shoulders and back. It’d been hours since she first started descending, and the deeper she went, the less likely it was that she’d ever climb back out.

I wish I could be there with you instead of stuck in your pocket.

“I wish you could help carry this stupid pack.”

Pers laughed and Millie smiled. Pers hadn’t laughed in a long time.

After the accident, Pers talked a lot. She struggled for a long time, which was understandable considering she’d gone from being a woman to being a pen. Millie worked hard to find a cure, but binding a soul to an object was extremely difficult, and breaking the soul away again was even worse. As the years passed, Pers talked less, she rarely laughed, and her voice sounded distant.

The past few months were the worst—before Millie reached the skypit, Pers hadn’t spoken at all in weeks, and before that her voice had been a distant whisper from the back of a deep cave.

Now Pers sounded like she did in those early days, like she was sitting next to Millie and whispering right into her ear.

Millie descended for what felt like forever. She stopped to rest, ate small meals, drank a little water, and tried not to think about the return trip. Pers talked quietly the whole time, reliving their brief but perfect life together—they grew up together in a small village, fell in love when they were teenagers, got married when they were twenty, and moved to Verash when Pers tested into a funded position at the Linkist Academy.

Then three years later, the accident.

The bottom of the pit appeared abruptly. The sunlight was gone above, and Millie had to light a small lantern although her oil was running low.

What do you see?

“There’s a floor. It looks like tile.” She stepped forward, going slow. It was like walking into a massive cathedral, although she knew the sky was somewhere above her, far enough that it felt like another life.

Millie pressed on into the darkness. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but the rumors all said the bottom of the skypit contained mysteries from the Abandoned. If anything could bring Pers back, it was some impossible Abandoned magic. There wasn’t a Linkist in the world with skill enough to fix Pers, and Millie had begged and pleaded with them all. Some even tried, and all had failed.

This was her last chance to get her wife back.

Millie’s footsteps echoed in the black like fluttering wings. Pers was quiet, but felt heavy in Millie’s pocket. The lantern light barely made a path into the gloom.

I lied before, when I said I missed touching the most.

Millie jumped at the sudden sound. “Really? What should you have said then?”

If I could have a body again, all I’d want is to sit in that stupid cafe with you again like we used to. Remember that place?

“Worst coffee in Verash, but it was cheap.”

A short pause. I can feel something up in the darkness. I don’t know what it is, Mills, but I’m afraid. It’s funny, we’ve come so far together, and now I’m scared.

Ahead, a shape gathered itself. Millie slowed as she approached. It was a mountain of something black and fine, like perfectly tilled dirt. Scattered throughout were shining bits of metal or precious stone, she couldn’t tell, but it made the pile sparkle.

It’s right there, Pers whispered urgently.

Millie knelt down and reached out. The way the stuff crumbled between her fingers, the way it left a strange, sticky black residue. It was ash, definitely ash, a massive pile of ash.

Mills, this is it. I can feel something.

Millie took Pers out of her pocket. “What am I supposed to do?”

Put the ash on me.

Millie picked up a handful of the stuff and as she sprinkled it over Pers, she wondered how Pers had known what it was—Millie hadn’t said that out loud.

It was too late, though. Pers was covered and Millie felt a tug against her chest like a rope wrapped around her ribs. She gasped as a sharp, cracking pain lanced through her nerves, burning every inch of her with an invisible flame, and she dropped Pers. The pen rattled onto the ground and rolled into the ash pile, and Millie fell backwards unable to do anything but flop onto the ground and groan as the pain continued its electric black shiver—

Until abruptly, it stopped.

“Millie?”

It was Pers, but the voice wasn’t inside of Millie’s head.

Millie groaned, tried to roll onto her side, but couldn’t move. The cave looked dim and distant, like she stood a far way back inside of a tunnel and couldn’t quite reach forward.

“Oh gods, Millie.”

Millie moved then, her body lurching upwards—

But Millie wasn’t controlling it.

“This is incredible.” Pers laughed and hands began patting Millie’s body.

Millie tried to scream, but she had no mouth and no tongue, no throat or vocal cords. She tried to struggle, to fight, but Pers moved around the cavern, she jumped and skipped and touched stone, touched everything but that ash.

What’s happening to me? The words came out of Millie like an echo. Pers stopped moving.

“Oh, sweetie,” Pers said softly with Millie’s voice. “I don’t know how, but I think I’m inside of you now. You’re still in there? Inside of me? Inside of you, I guess.”

Pers, what did you do?

“I didn’t do anything.” She laughed, joyous and shocked. “But I’m free, Mills. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live inside of a pen? To be just an object? It was torture, every single day. But I can breathe and run and laugh. And gods, Mills, you got skinny!”

Pers, please stop it. I’m trapped in here… I can’t move…

“I know sweetie. It’s not so bad though, at least you’re inside of a body, right?” Pers scooped up the lantern and the pack. “We’ll figure something out. Maybe we can share time? It won’t be so bad, and at least we’re together.”

Millie tried to struggle, but there was no her to struggle, no body or limbs or blood. She was a speck in the back of her own mind, a fly on the shoulder of Pers.

You don’t know. You have no clue, do you?

“Know what?” Pers rifled through the pack, frowning to herself.

Food and water. We don’t have enough food and water for the trip back up.

Pers slowly at down and stared at her hands. It was strange for Millie, looking through her own eyes, but from a distance.

“You knew, didn’t you? You knew the whole time.”

I realized half way down we’d never get back up.

“It was a suicide mission. You came down here to die with me.”

And here we are. Maybe this is good, right? We can die together and at least you get a little time with a body before you go.

Pers began to sob. She pulled her knees up to her chest and cried so hard Millie could feel muscles tighten and a sharp but distant pain.

It’ll be okay, Pers. At least you’re not a pen anymore, right?

“I don’t want to die in this pit with you,” Pers whispered. “Stuck in your body.”

Pers—

“I never wanted any of this. You know why I spent so much time trying to perfect body Links, don’t you? I don’t want to die, Millie. I thought if I could anchor my soul to an object—“ She laughed bitterly. “And it worked, but it worked too well. Now here you are, telling me that I’m screwed, that we’re stuck and I’m dead no matter what. Well, I’m not going to die with you, Mills. I’m not going to give up.”

Pers stood and walked to the ash pile. She knelt down and picked up the pen, holding it in her hand. She bit down hard on her lip.

What are you doing?

“Funny, I always thought it was bigger.” She dipped her other hand into the ash pile. “Maybe someone will come down and find me again. I don’t have to be stuck here forever, right? It doesn’t have to be forever.”

Pers, please, don’t—

But Pers shoved the ash against the pen, and Millie felt another horrible sucking and more pain filled her with a crippling sharp electric rumble, and she toppled over sideways, the pen slipping from her fingers.

When she came back to the cavern, she could move her hands, her legs. Pers was gone. She scrambled to her hands and knees and searched for the pen—

There she was, lying on the floor a few feet away. Millie picked it up and weighed it in her hands.

“Pers?” Millie whispered.

But there was nothing, only silence.

“Pers, please.” Millie choked back tears. “I just wanted to fix you.” She gripped the pen against her chest and held it there. “I just wanted to be together.”

Only silence and the taste of ash.

ps, The title of this piece was the prompt and the name of an ambient black metal album. It’s up on Youtube if you’re interested in listening! Do me a favor, like and share this if you enjoyed it, and have a good week. - DC