Monster

Andrew had an aura of twitchy, baited breath around him on Monday night.  It had been like this every Monday night since Victoria had started working at the Seven-Eleven on the corner of Third street, taking over the night shift for John Halderson two months ago.  For all of the times Andrew had said to himself that he just didn't like people, he had to admit that he enjoyed the few minutes when the shift would turn over and he could engage in the smallest of talks with Victoria before he headed back the two blocks to his apartment.  He had wound himself up for the small questions, the innocuous emotions that might pass between them.  Despite his perfect view of the street and the sky, he might start with "how's the weather?" or something like that.  In the last half hour, he gave each of the five customers who came in the wrong change.  Only two of them noticed, more in a hurry to get back home through the glow of the streetlamps.

Victoria's entry with entourage chimed the door, yanking his head around.  She was wearing a grey sweatshirt he noticed, one he hadn't seen before.  He had the words in his mouth to say something to her, anything, but her friends just talked and talked as they followed her towards the back room, passing the counter.  He didn't want to be rude and interrupt, not because he had any respect for Victoria's friends, but because Victoria might think he was a worse person than he was if he did.  He didn't like tall Jenny and smiling Lucy, in great part because he felt jealousy bubble within him when he saw them hanging around Victoria.  They twittered, glancing his way once or twice while Victoria changed into her uniform and clocked her time-sheet.  Then Victoria was at the counter, and Andrew almost had hope she would say something to him, but she just kept talking to her friends.  

Endless gossip.  Something about a tv show.  He didn't watch tv, and so he ignored it as he tore himself away from Victoria's presence and clocked out.  Her sweatshirt was in a pile on the back room table, shoved up against a small mirror, and he had an urge to touch it.  Nobody would know.  He didn't anyway.  Slipping off the nametag and the overshirt, he scrawled the time in pen and walked out.  An old lady had come in, buying an automotive magazine and a snickers, so Victoria was still busy, and so he could only continue walking.  Her two friends stood off to the side, keeping the conversation alive like an ember for when Victoria could participate again.  He heard the familiar sound of the bell ring one last time that night as he walked out the door.  Weeks earlier, when Victoria's friends first started joining her for her shift, he had stayed a few minutes, poking through the racks of magazines and candy while he waited for a chance to say something to her.  There hadn't been a chance.  Lucy just kept talking and giggling and Jenny would get a remark in seamlessly, glancing conspiratorially at both her friends, as Lucy stopped to breathe.  Victoria talked less, and the fact that Andrew didn't even get a chance to hear much of her voice made the noise even more dreadful.  He liked how she would laugh though, every once in a while a smile bloomed on her face and pure, joyful sound would reach his ears.  He thought it was a perfect laugh, and only disliked her friends more when they made fun of her for it.

Tonight though, he had given up on a conversation.  Maybe tomorrow, he thought, though he knew that her friends would follow her on Tuesday night as well.  He was frowning the whole three blocks he walked to get to his apartment.  He lay down on the rumpled sheets of his bed that was pushed up into one corner.  From his view, he scanned the room searching for something.  The TV that he never used, the refrigerator he stocked with root beer, the pile of ramen wrappers, pizza boxes and pistachio shells that formed a ring around his overflowing trashcan: all of these things couldn't hold his attention.  The ceiling was almost comforting in its blankness, less of a reminder of his life than anything else.  The bubbling of jealousy that had filled him was leaking out leaving an emptiness that made him heavier instead of light.  Closing his eyes and blindly tossing his clothes in the direction of the closet, he slumbered.

Andrew woke to a pressing under his left eyelid.  The light was still on, heating his face.  He recalled a similar feeling when he had put in colored contacts for a Halloween costume years ago; a vampire costume with red eyes that he had almost gone trick-or-treating in.  His eyelid pushed open, but he still couldn't see.  Blinded by the pressure that climbed from inside his eye to his face, then dripping down onto his chest.  He smelled raw eggs as he opened his right eye, looking across the bridge of his nose at the weight.  Blue and black filled his sight, mixing like paint swirling on a canvas.  It was small, billowing bigger like smoke, a face like a chicken with the body of a stub-tailed, six legged lizard.  It paced down his chest, growing to the size of a cat before it was completely free of his eye.  It looked back at him, reflective pools of empty glass that saw nothing and held everything.  The beast scampered down, through the window and off into the night. Andrew lay there, feeling the moist trail drying on his skin where it had passed, wondering when he would wake up.  He drifted back to sleep hours later.

In the morning, he woke to a feeling of puffiness, his left eye heavy in his head.  In the bathroom mirror his eye looked glassy and empty, a faint glint of yellow caught deep inside.  Andrew's bathroom light flickered on and off, a loose bulb, giving him only moments to inspect himself.  It must have been a trick of the light.  He felt normal, just a little puffy eyed as if he had cried in his sleep.  His pillow was lightly moist, smelling faintly of raw eggs.

By four, Andrew began his shift, selling candy and magazines, stocking shelves, counting change.  Instead of the slow building of excitement to closing time, and Victoria, Andrew thought of his dream, the absurdity of it.  Andrew had dreamed that his light had been left on, he thought.  It was off when he woke up, and he certainly would not have been able to sleep with it roasting him.  The creature disgusted him, he decided.  It was repulsive with its slimy skin and its many legs.  He disliked the audacity it displayed, venturing out into the light of his room.  What kept him on the idea of the creature was its emergence from his eye.  He disliked the idea that it had been a growth off of him, that it had been part of him.  He disliked more the idea that the creature might have somehow gone into his eye from somewhere else, invading him before leaving.

The sun set before he even realized it, night dragging itself into the streets.  Andrew barely had half an hour to agonize about what he might begin to say to Victoria when she arrived, her friends following her.  Jenny lagged behind, listening as Lucy prattled on, and a strange thing happened.  As Victoria passed the register and Lucy trailed behind her, Jenny actually stopped and looked at him.  "What's up?" she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.  Lucy and Victoria didn't even notice.  Andrew shifted uncomfortably behind the counter.

"Lovely weather tonight, isn't it? he replied.  The line he had been crafting for Victoria if he could ever get a word in.  But it wasn't her, it was one of the other ones, one of the ones he secretly despised.  He cursed the fact that he had let the words slip out to Jenny, that she would have the benefit of such a bland monument of his interest.

Jenny leaned forward on the counter as she spoke, a twitch of a smile gaining her lips.  "Kinda shitty, I think.  Been cloudy the whole day, not that I've been out today much anyway."  Then she waited.  On him.  Andrew had not prepared anything else to say, he had only had half an hour to worry and think, and all of the words and the phrases that he had thought up others days fled to the darker recesses of his mind.  "C'mon 'drew, what's up?" she reiterated.

"I thought you'd be talking to Lucy" was all he could think to say.

"I can't talk to you?  My friend?" Jenny asked.  She pursed her lips in pretty disappointment.

"You aren't my friend," Andrew thought, then said, the motion of the thought continuing out his mouth.  "I don't like you."  An afterthought.  Jenny turned and ran.  The door chimed; he had heard it so many times, but it seemed to echo this time.  Victoria came out, work-shirt on, and started talking to Lucy.  She didn't seem like she had even noticed the absence.  Lucy, for her part, glanced at the door between phrases, then over at him.  She had a look of worry, of confusion, scrunching up her blonde eyebrows.  She didn't say anything.

Andrew clocked out.  Victoria's grey sweatshirt was sitting on the table again.  Had she worn that when she walked in, Andrew wondered.  He walked out, slowly, taking glances at Victoria, trying to find an explanation.  It was in her eyes, a tiny sliver of emptiness where the color was hollowed out.  She ignored him and continued to talk to Lucy.  He blinked and nothing seemed to be wrong.  Her eyes caught the light and they were impenetrable.  Andrew's walk home took longer than usual.  He turned on the tv, staring at the screen in an effort to free his mind.  The dream was getting to him.  Once he had distracted himself, he might sleep.  The tv was still on when he woke, pressure bursting forth from his eyeball, the dull thump of something jumping off his chest to the floor.  Eggs.  Its back leg disappeared out the window as he oriented himself.  Breathing heavily, he entered the bathroom.  His eyes were perfectly normal.  A nightmare where he didn't completely wake up right away.  No more sleep tonight, Andrew resolved.  He stared at the glassy surface of the tv, playing old Three Stooges skits in between commercials for cleaning supplies.  He needed to take out the trash, his room was starting to smell.  Tomorrow morning, before Andrew went to work, he would take it out.  It slipped back into the room at four in the morning as the commercials went on break.  He remembered the blue-black of its moist skin from last night.  In its beak were bits of string, shiny and luminescent.  They reminded him of laughter.  Pausing on the window sill, the creature swallowed, looking Andrew in the eyes with its glassy orbs.

The creature adroitly leaped to the top of the tv, eyes locked with Andrew's.  Andrew backed away.  It jumped to the light switch, shrouding the room in darkness.  "What are you?" Andrew said.  "Stay back!"  With his back to the corner, Andrew could only watch in fear as the creature walked up to him across his bed.  It climbed him, small claws clinging to his clothing until it arrived at his face.  Andrew pushed at it, fingers slipping off its slick skin, mucus like egg-white running down his fingers.  Then it pressed itself into his left eye, beak first.  The creature oozed its way in.  Andrew got a grasp of its back leg and pulled, his entire head yanked forward.  Inside his skull, he felt a small tearing, as if its claws were anchored inside his flesh.  In pain, he let go, and the last of the leg disappeared behind his eyelid.  It was the same glassy color as before, his eye, and in the mirror more flecks of light shone from within it.

Andrew went to work with an eyepatch on Wednesday.  Victoria came in alone, eyes dulled with specks of emptiness more countless than before.  Andrew seethed.  He had no words, no grasp of what he could do, what he might say.  Andrew had observed the slouch of Victoria's back, the silence that followed her to the back room.  She wouldn't meet his gaze after she had changed.  He went to clock out.

"Vile creature, aren't you?  You strip away her friends, her life.  You make her like me."  He tore the eyepatch off, staring into the wall-mirror.  The scratches that the eyepatch had hidden were faded from the bright red scratches they had been into pink lines that radiated around his eye, which was still glassy, just like the creature's eye.  It all made sense to him, and it sickened him.  He could smell saltiness from the crumpled sweatshirt on the desk.  "I don't want you anymore," Andrew whispered to the empty room.  His stomach was unsettled, and as the image of the creature plagued his thoughts, his revulsion increased.  "I created you, somehow, so how do I destroy you?"  On the table was the timesheet with a cheap bic pen.  Andrew's hand shook as he grasped it.

At the register, Victoria heard the scream, shocked out of the doldrums she was experiencing.  It was a short scream, high pitched.  The store was silent.  Victoria flicked her blonde hair back behind her ear and headed to the back room.  She heard chuckling as she approached.  Andrew leaned over the table.  His left eye had slick blood around it, spattered on his skin just as much as it had upon the floor, the table, her sweatshirt.

"OhmyGod are you okay?  Andrew?"  As he turned his head toward her, she noticed the empty socket behind the blood.  It had stopped pouring out, but his eye was gone.  Had that been under his eyepatch?  How long had he had it?  Andrew was grinning.

"I killed it.  I don't know if I can make it right, but I killed it."  He sounded triumphant, grinning as he said it, gesturing into the puddle of gore on the table.  In the center, the blue-black form, like a lizard the size of an eyeball, twitched.   "Almost."  Stuck into the desk, impaling the lizard, was the pen she had just used to fill out her time card, which was now drenched in blood.

"My nightmare," Victoria murmured.  She stepped into the gory room, moving closer to the creature.  Its glass eyes had clouded over, dark, reflecting the bright red pool.  She reached out to it, to the hole in its chest.  Little golden strings twined up the pen, reaching out the inches between it and her finger.  Victoria brought them close to her face to see the fine threads, and they darted into her eyes, filling the empty vacuum of colorlessness.

Through his one good eye, Andrew watched it all happen.  He did not remember who she was to him, but she was wearing the store uniform, so she must work here.  He smiled.  The bad thing was dying.  Andrew supposed that he had killed it because of how slimy it looked and the faint odor of raw eggs that surrounded it.  With a lightness under his eyelids, he slid back against the wall, and fell asleep.

A little bragging.

I am to some, most even, a legend.  Each story billowing larger in the retelling, and there are many stories.  Most of them are based on something true.  Most of them leave out the good parts.  I grew to fame as they say.  Killing a wyvern isn't actually that hard though.  Most of the men I grew up with would have come out alive.  Back in the blackened forests beasts like that don't deter the people who live with worse breathing down their neck.

No, wyverns are small creatures.  It was only one, not five or ten like some people say it was, not did I escape unharmed, barely breaking a sweat.  There was a long scratch running down my abdomen for a year or two afterwards because I was careless and didn't bring a real weapon.  I had to use a skinning knife, though it was sharpened exquisitely.  They storytellers never play up how fastidious I am with keeping things maintained, though honestly, I can't blame them.  It fits their style to make me out to be going from one thing to another without a care, and there is certainly no time to be sharpening swords or washing blood and ichor out of a shirt.

Anyway, the reason it went into the stories was the girl.  I figured she was just some farm girl who got lost out there in the woods.  Every so often one of them ignores her pa's warnings and comes flower picking or sees a glint of fireflies that seems quite inviting and mysterious.  At least, that was what my parents would say to me.  I hadn't actually seen one before.  I was only twelve at the time, and I hadn't been let to go roam around by myself for longer than around a year by then.  Turns out she was a princess.  Again, I stress that I wasn't really in on the outsider customs at that point, certainly not at the level I am now, or when I talked a duke into playing cards with me with his land at stake.  Don't tell anyone about that one by the way.  He wouldn't like it coming back around to embarrass him, and I like visiting in the summer time.  He has the most delightful gardens.

Anyway, I say this because it would be obvious to you that a girl in silk trappings and glittering with jewelry from ear to toe would not normally be mistaken for a farmer.  Also the reason the wyvern wanted to snatch her up and take her to his nest.  Large flying lizards are like crows in that respect; they really can't resist the shiny stuff.  There was this one time where I tricked on using a gold plated box and. . .ok, not so relevant, I admit.  Just ask for the tale of the twisted tree in the white forest some time if you want to hear it.  There's a lot more to it than you might think, and they get it pretty accurate.

Anyway, I'm walking through the woods, looking around for a deer my dad had sent me out to drag back to camp, and I hear this high pitched scream.  I look up.  Shiny, pink and white, and all flailing in a wyvern's claws.  Wasn't hard to track it to the nest, especially since we forest folk tend to make a point of knowing exactly where wyvern nests are.  It helps when you need some new steel or start losing metal objects.  The trick was getting there before it gets tired of dragging her back into the nest and just stabs her in the gut.  For her sake, it was a good thing I was a fast runner.  Her belly was mostly intact and her arms were only a little slashed up by the time I popped my head up over the edge of the nest sitting in one of the long-armed trees.

Strawberry-Blonde

The first time I saw Amy was the day Dr. Nefarious first got arrested while robbing the Wells Fargo.  She was sitting at the bar, watching the news, and I really only got a look at her short, strawberry-blonde hair from across the room.  I've always been a corner person.  Anyway, I wasn't staring or anything, it was more of how you notice someone particularly pretty and it sticks in your mind.  That night I was more interested to hear that for the first time in our city's history we had what amounted to a super-villain in actual custody.  I think it might have been Galaxy Girl, or maybe Chessmaster who caught him, but that doesn't matter too much.  They got their ceremony.  After a pretty short sentencing, Dr. Nefarious became the first super-powered inmate.

It was two weeks later when I saw her again.  Same bar, same chair, same head cocked upward to watch the TV on the wall.  I'm not sure exactly what made me go up and talk to her.  Might have been the way her hair was just sort of fuzzy, in that way it gets when you fix it up with your fingers as you're leaving the house.  Gave me a feeling like she wanted someone to talk to.  I introduced myself, Martin, and she told me her name was Amy.  We talked, small-talk, and then I had to ask why she was so into the news coverage.  At that point it was still big political speeches, national, that were all about the whole Dr. Nefarious incident.  He called himself that, by the way.  Sure it sounded so cliche, but I have to admit that it was catchy.  Nowdays the villains have horrible sense in naming, especially with the umlaut craze lately.

Amy startled at that, setting down her third shot of bourbon halfway through drinking it.  She asked if it was that obvious.  It was either that or I was more boring than I thought.  Most women who don't want company are less polite about saying so than quick glances up to the screen every time it came off commercials.  Obvious but not odd I said.  I only personally stopped watching it because I had an inkling of where things would end up.  She was blushing a bit at that point, and while I attributed it more to the liquor at the time, from what I came to know I think it might have been more to do with getting caught peeking at the screen.  Girl could hold her liquor, what can I say?  What did she think about it, I asked.  She started in on pretty much my own reasoning at that point.  Said that actual containment wouldn't last long since the jails weren't prepared for it.  Maybe the next time, but not this one.  At the least there would eventually be jail-breaks from other super-villains just to muck things up for the law.  Bad for the economy to keep them in jail anyway.

I was nodding my head along with her until the last part.  You might be like me and not know what she was talking about with that last part.  Nothing said stable economy to me in bank robbery and attempted coup of local government.  Dr. Nefarious was one of the more sane ones, honestly.  There was a nutter around that time who went by the name of Penguin Man.  Wanted to turn the city into a giant penguin habitat.  Crazy.  Anyway, it doesn't really match up from what I could see and I said so.  Amy gives me the eyebrow at that point.  Makes a big theatrical start in on how I was wrong and she would tell me why.  Hand gestures and everything.  So first, she says, you have to think beyond the immediate cause and effect.  Beyond Villain and Hero too she says.  Bottom line is that most of the shenanigans recently had limited actual damages.  A few bullet holes and broken walls.  A broken tree or two and some crushed cars.  Most of that was covered by insurance.  Kinda crazy not to get it with the way the city was anyway.  Next is the jobs created.  Lots of repair jobs, protection jobs, super-proofing jobs (though those were mostly scams), and even criminal jobs to pull money into the local business.  That's without secondary impact stuff, Amy says.  We talked around it more, the whole thing took longer than it did in the retelling of course.  More time, more talk, more alcohol.

It became sort of a weekly thing.  Friday nights down at the bar.  Not the big conversations about the economics of super-crime, though we had a few more of those, but just conversation.  She laughed, screwed up her nose at the prospect of fruity alcohols (she deemed them "tainted beverages"), and made my weekend drinking habit less anti-social.  I, for my part, cracked bad jokes, listened to her thoughts on the world and its workings, and distracted her from some of the troubles she had been having.  It came out a week or two in that she was out of work.  Not broke and penniless though, despite the way her bourbon habit and alcohol tolerance fought late into the night. She had some money saved up from past jobs.  "Lucrative but not exactly stable" is how she described them once.  I didn't pry, at least not too much.  Not in an un-friendly way.  It mostly just made her glum when she bemoaned having to get back into the job-market.  This was when I would turn the subject.  Tacos, Roman sculpture, the news.  Normal distracting things.

Four months after I introduced myself, the topic was the breakout of Dr. Nefarious.  Amy was sure it was some convoluted re-balancing of the criminal infrastructure that involved breaking him and some of his lackeys out, while I was sure it had just taken him time to recuperate before escaping on his own.  Long night, loud conversation.  I woke up Saturday on an unfamiliar bed that smelled a bit like bourbon.  Amy was passed out, arm over my chest, drooling on her pillow.

The room looked organized for comfort and use, though not for looks.  Newspapers and a phonebook crowded the top of the nightstand, my glasses resting atop the stack next to a half-empty, red pen.  There was a pink-curtained window, just a crack in between the edges that drifted a line of light back and forth across my face as the curtains fluttered from the AC.  I recognized some of the clothes that spilled out of the bottom of a half-closed closet, but most of them were more casual than what she put on for her weekly trips to the bar.  Grey, black, yellow, brown t-shirts.  Jeans, black and blue.  What looked like a crumpled up leather jacket.  A fuzzy, furry, brown-with-white-trim coat at the end of the outpouring, draped up the foot of the bed.  Manila carpet, white walls, brown, wood-finished doors, and white trim.  One of them was cracked open just enough to see bathroom tiling.  No clock, no TV.

I might have moved, or she just decided to roll over.  Either way, she woke up slow, stretching her arms and arching her back a bit.  Cute enough to make me blush.  When she brushed my chest she made a noise something along the lines of an inquisitive "mnph", followed by an "oh", and then a "coulda been worse".

We had coffee.  The living room was just off the bedroom, kitchen separated from it by a counter.  Nothing special, just a couch, a recliner, a short coffee table, the kind you have to stoop over a bit, an old lamp, and a wired telephone, which was a bit archaic.  Hadn't seen one of those in a few years by then.  I took the couch, she took the recliner.  It didn't come off as too awkward.  She went for a shower; then it was awkward.  I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be gone or not by the time she was out of it.  Phone rings.  Her land-line that is.  I take it as my cue to leave, poking my head back in the bedroom to make sure I didn't forget something (I almost left my glasses, its a weak prescription), and then it went to voicemail.  I have the front door halfway open.  "Amy, this is Dr. Nefarious, I need you to gather the rest of the minions, same spot as usual. . ."  So I stood there for a moment.  Just that moment.  It was one of those clarity things.  Anyway, maybe it would have been polite to stay and explain myself, but I left.  I still can't figure out the etiquette for that situation.

I missed next Friday at the bar.  That, I'm pretty sure was impolite in a way.  It wasn't really standing her up, I told myself, but I don't believe it.  I watched the news, followed the story of the breakout.  Dr. Nefarious was back to what he did, namely heists and large scale death-ray threats.  There were two or three those two weeks.  Up from the one a month or so that it had been before he went in jail.  It leveled off in the next few weeks.  I had picked up the courage, though that feels like somewhat of a wrong word, and gone to the bar that second week.  She had left a note with the bartender.  "Thank you.  Sorry?"  It was on a yellow sticky-note in red-pen.

Thrown

The floor hummed.  It was not a pulse or a throbbing or a vibration, but a hum.  In the stillness I could feel it, see the flicker of the blue inset lines as they zipped out into the darkness in criss-crossing patterns of varying complexity.  The spot I was standing was a nexus of them, seeming to funnel each strand inwards toward my feet.  The lines didn't move besides the flickering, standing perfectly still in the heated darkness.  It wasn't oppressive since the air flowed and eddied around me, but it only carried warmth with it, scentless besides a faint smell of sweat.  My skin was flushed, likely a faint reddish-pink in normal light but showing more of a purple tone in the blue glow.  With nothing else to do, I started walking.

Each barefoot step echoed; off what I couldn't say.  There were no walls, no ceiling, just darkness.  My hands wouldn't reach anything above me when I stretched or jumped, and the light from the floor, bright as it was, didn't reach any hanging object. The floor was flat, in a manner of speaking.  Perhaps it would be best to describe it as a large number of flat, octagonal platforms or pillars that were each slightly different in elevation, sized just larger than my feet.  As I moved, stepping onto the lines that covered the surface of the floor, they began to strobe, breaking past the physical hum. The flash of light, whiter and less blue followed the rhythm of my feet as they echoed along my pathless way.

I wandered through the emptiness until I saw a pinprick of light extending up from the darkness.  Approaching, it grew higher and wider in my sight.  The center was a pillar, octagonal and thick, that sprouted up from the relatively flat ground up into the sky.  Springing off from the trunk at the center were the lines, branching out into the darkness on their own, more intricate than on the ground.  The squiggles and whirls were like flowers and leaves and gnarled branches all in one woven mess.  They pulsed with my steps as well as I strode closer.

I set my hand upon it, the cold blue-grey of the pillar giving way under my skin, crumbling like a dry sandcastle to the touch.  Inside were cords of blue and green and red and yellow, of purple and pink and turquoise.  They twined around each other, a rainbow of wire that throbbed with light as I stretched my hand closer.  The moment I touched them, their color exploded out into the lines of color in flashes, lighting up the landscape all around in prismatic bursts.  There was still no ceiling, no walls, just the ground and the tree.  I became certain this was not a dream.

Marrow Lost

The blade of the sword was slick with blood, clinging to the white metal edge.  It was not chipped, though some still said that it was made of bone, even after the hundreds of years it had wandered the earth, changing masters when each successive wielder's luck ran dry.  The man who held it, back pressed against a moss-covered wall, was too tired to stand by his own strength.  Still, the sword tip stretches out toward his hunter, pulled forward by its own lust for blood as much as the strength of its master's arm.  Besides the two men, the ruined bridge and the clearing it sits in is empty and quiet.  The water that travels by beside them is content to babble on despite the scene playing out.  Blood spatters in the grass, mixed from both men, map the progress of the fight back through the undergrowth, traveling for hours before finding the road they had encountered each other on.  With a snap, the blade lunges forward, passing by its crude, iron relative to bury itself in its hunter's chest.  The man was not worthy, but the blade is content to drink in such a failure's life.  Satiated, it sleeps.

Its master collapses, dropping the hilt, gasping for breath.  He himself did not best some famous knight in battle.  He stabbed an old man riding a horse through a bad country.  Perhaps the old man had lived in overconfidence too long, perhaps his skills had degraded from his youth.  If he had recognized the symbol on the old man's cloak, he might have been too scared to approach, but the moon had been covered in clouds that night.  It would be months before rumors spread that the great rabid lion had died in some lost and forgotten province.  No rumors would spread for the thief that was emptying of blood as he hyperventilated on the ground.  None either for his former partner who lay with a hole in his chest.

Something between greed and hatred enters the thief as he catches sight of the sword.  It was the sword's fault, after all.  It yearned for combat, drawing him into it, refusing to rest until everything was dead.  He was not willful enough to control its urges, and it was too proud to acknowledge his weakness.  He loathed the thing, forcing him away from society more than he already had been ostracized.  With his last strength, he pushed the sword forward along the blood-slick grass and over the edge of the bank and down into the river.

Ancient World: Part 3

To say that the street was shady would be accurate.  It did not just have a feeling of danger from the wet, creaking planks that barely held together as buildings, but the way that they leaned inwards over the street, slumping in a way that was halfway between looming and exhausted left shadows for any number of unfriendly creatures hid inside.  Darkness was not a commodity, even at mid-day on the street, and as such, the Black Seagull was hard to find for those who didn't know where to look.  The entrance was tucked away inside an alley that slanted off the street that itself was mistaken for an alley by those who were not at home in the shadows.  The muddy stains on the young man's black coat blended in with the blackish brown of the planks and the muddy path as he made his way down the street.  His backpack with most of his valuable posessions sat safely back at a more respectable tavern in a rented room.  Less to keep out of the hands of pickpockets.  He would re-stock on provisions and find a shovel later in the day, but for the moment he wanted more information, and this tavern was the only place he knew that might have a lead.  At least, a lead that wouldn't cost more than he could pay.  He was searching for the storyteller that had come to the port months back, back before he had gotten into his adventures.  Adventure.  He still was new at them.  It had been one tale, a tale of a stone obelisk that would whisk men away to fields of gold.  A tale of a magical rock, a key, that opened the way to wonders.

The light in the tavern was dull, like it had died and the pale echo of light was all that illuminated the dozen or so faces that drank beer, murmering to each other.  If the street had been any brighter, the young man's eyes would not have been adjusted for the gloom.  It was the same as it always had been.  A thin, long room sandwiched between other slightly more reputable establishments in the dock district, wall sconces burning low.  The old man wasn't there.  He walked to the back, passing conversations that went quiet as he passed, then started up in hushed tones.  The barkeep looked young for how old he really was.  Black, matted hair and a trimmed beard with dark eyes that looked like they were made of polished rock.  He had been the barkeep since before the young man was born, since before the rifts had been rumored to open deep in the wild lands of this unsettled continent.

"So you return, young master Thistle."  The barkeeps voice was low, with the barest hint of harshness.  "I expected you to have died wandering about after that silly tale, but fools have their luck."  The young man, thistle was not his true name, only smiled and pushed a small bag across the counter, jingling with a few coins.

"When was that storyteller last here, Greggory?"  His voice was quiet, just above a whisper.

"So you're looking for that one again?  Going to pay him back for the wild goose chase?"  Greggory leaned back, chuckling.  "No, I can't tell you that, the man has a high priced deal you can't match up against."  The young man's face tightened, eyes sliding downwards in thought as he reached forward toward the bag.  "But, what I can tell you is who else is looking for him, for that price at least."

The young man's hand stopped , hovering over the bag.  Greggory grinned at the hesitation.  "And where I can find them."

"That will cost you more.  An account of the route you took before coming back."  Greggory eyed the bag of coins.

"I'll draw a map of half of my journey and throw in a few more coins."

"Well. . .that might be acceptable.  How many more will depend on the quality of the map."  Greggory ducked down behind the counter, a few glasses clinked against each other as he rummaged into the back.  He straightened up, setting parchment and a quill pen on the table before stooping to grab a well of ink.

The young man nodded.  "A beer then, while I'm working," he said, digging out a few coins from his pockets and placing them on the bar.  He retreated to a small table, scratching out lines on the parchment, labeling parts, and drawing in small graphic representations where they were needed.  It became a long flowing line that ran from one edge to another.  Satisfied, he returned to the counter.  "Will this do?"

"Come back in two days.  I'll have a few people I know check it for accuracy as well as they can and I'll have your information ready."

As the young man left the Black Seagull, a few eyes tracked his progress, making sure to remember his face.

Ancient World: Part 2

A light flutter of wet leaves drifting down through the cracks in the land was the only sound the daytime transition made.  Where the trees stood up, thick trunks of ash-grey, the land drifted apart farther, revealing them to stretch deeper down than up, disappearing deep into the darkness.  The young man could only stare in silence, jaw hanging, as he caught sight of the cobbled stone walls that made up the sides of the moving pieces of land, soil resting on top for the first few feet.

The island of land his camp rested on drifted for the day, moving farther away from the glowing tree.  At times he saw windows on the sides of some islands, or doors, yet no stairs down, no lights or signs of inhabitants.  At dusk, the land moved back together, nestling around the tall trunks of the trees.  It was as if it had never happened, besides the position of the trees, the forest floor was as bland as ever.  He would need a shovel, he reasoned.  Jumping down, would leave him with no way back up that he could see, and his backpack was not equipped to solve the problem in any other way.  He also did not happen to have a shovel.  In the dark, he made his way back to the tree, pushing against it with pendant in hand.

Dawn light seeped into the cave, empty as it had been when he had found it.  A weeks travel was ahead of him, then a shopping trip, then another weeks hike back through the wilderness to find the place.  Treasure hunting was turning out to be more boring than he had anticipated.  But there was the magical land beyond the portal.  Mysteries and forces beyond human knowledge.  Some of the explorers thought the ruins and portals had to do with aliens or demons.  There were certainly tales of feral beasts and magical creatures that had been spotted in the areas around and beyond the portals.  Others tied legends of wizards of ancient past to the portals, citing their opening as some mystic veil lifting that had once protected the treasure inside from thieves.  There were more theories around, but the young man had been struck by something that rang of truth in these.  The fact that there were, as he had heard it, piles of gold, magic swords, and glory to be had in the ruins was the more pressing matter in his mind.  The way that the treasures got to those places was just another way that let his fancy wander back to the idea of being rich.  Such things, as well as what pleasures to spend the expected riches on, were what occupied his mind on the way back.

He was lost in thought about where to buy a house when he crested the hill above the port city of Rowenton.  Its docks stretched the ten miles around the half-moon cove that housed hundreds of ships, from fishing skiffs to warships.  Dotted around the cove were the various taverns, brothels, and fish markets that came with being a port town.  There were the market districts further in, large stone stores and bright crimson tents that covered a majority of the rest of the city.  At one tip of the bay, situated farthest from the youth's vantage point was the castle that sat watching over the residents.  It looked permanently dilapidated, though the defenses had never been bested by pirates or bandits when every decade or so some crazed group would see the wealth of the markets and descend upon the city.  It was in this town, in one of the shabbier taverns around the bay, the Black Seagull, that the young man had procured his necklace and the stories of treasure.  It was in that same tavern that he would truly begin his journey.

Ancient World: part 1

Long lines of sunlight filtered into the cave through hanging vines.  It was peaceful, quiet, deserted, at least to the untrained eye.  The young man that swept aside the curtain of foliage to peer into the gloom was of a more knowledgeable sort.  Fishing a small stone pendant up from out of his shirt, he glanced back and forth between the darkness and the polished jade arrow hung on a thick leather string.  It pulled in his hands, moving forward with a soft tug that drew him inwards.  Behind him the vines slid back into place, dimming the area again.  Stepping farther in, he mumbled a whisper to the stone and it began to glow green.  It was a dull, faint light, but he felt around on the wall, searching for nooks and crannies, sweeping the light across the stone, letting the pull guide him as much as the light.

It fit with a click, finding a crack in the stone and magnetically snapping together.  A green glow spread through the stone itself, like moss growing in a moment what a summer might nourish.  Then, like a vacuum the air, the vines, the young man's coat, his backpack straps, his hair, all of it was pulled in towards the wall.  He stepped through.

It was dark, and the air was musty.  Stars shined down through a thin canopy of trees that scattered the ground around him.  It was an old forest, stretching out all around him on the flat expanse he sat upon.  Standing, turning, he saw the tree-trunk glowing the same green behind his entrance.  That would be for later.  For now, he had treasure to hunt, if only he could figure out where.

Hours later, he had found nothing more but trees and dirt.  No sign of what was hidden in this rift.  No sign of the local fauna that he had come to expect.  Perhaps this one had already been cleaned out, he thought.  He wasn't the only person making his way through the wilderness, searching for these places.  Yet he had seen no tracks that would indicate this place had been found.

He set up camp near the glowing tree, kindling a fire and raising a tent.  The night was turning to dawn when he finished.  Sleep hit him fast, exhausted as he was.  As he slept, the fire sputtered out, the sun rose higher, and the forest changed.  When he awoke, the trees had shifted.  It was like they had uprooted, traveled a ways, and then set down again.  The sun was setting as he prepared some rations for his rumbling stomach.  The tree that he had settled next to had moved, and he had to search an hour to find the glow again.

That night he napped, relocating his camp to the glowing tree again.  The dawn came, then the sun climbed.  He watched the trees, fiddling with his pendant.  It was not the trees that moved, however.  In large chunks, the ground split, like an earthquake in molasses.

The madness of the forest.

The storm challenged me as I strode through my forest.  Rain pressed down, attempting to flatten me and all else.  The dirt below turned traitor and sucked softly at my paws.  Thunder boomed in defiance for all the creatures to hear, echoing off the trees and hills.  Above and around the lightning snapped down like an aimless spear, searching for something to consume.  The wind was my ally though, combing its way through my fur, down my snout, sides, and through my long tail.  It raced like a pack of my own between the trees, calling out shrill cries of an intense hunt.

She would be out there too, black of fur to match my white.  Her tracks and smell drifted like shades through the forest, carried as news by the wind and muffled by the oppressive rain.  We both sought some fight that the storm would never truly give.  I felt alive in it, feeling the intense glee of running towards danger.  Yet my mind, if not my instincts wandered like this, wondering what I was really doing, what she was doing.  It was on the hill ahead that I caught sight of her form in a flash of lightning.  She would be the only other one to prowl the woods at night, even if her size served as a distinctive indicator.  Others of our kind might stand to our belly, the largest of them.  They played and nurtured us in our youth and slowly grew frightened as we began to tower over them.  She became a tyrant, then an outcast.  I left before I was driven out, not by their power which was less, but by my own instincts and isolation.  I could do nothing but follow her tracks up and over the rise.  If I moved too quickly, I might catch up and be forced into a more real combat.  If I slowed, I would lose the scent.  Her fur scraped off on tree-trunks.  Broken flowers were smashed into the ground where she ran.  Down the slope and through a deep ravine where deer would sleep in lighter weather.  Through a copse of trees that held deep markings of the bears that made their home on the sunward side of a small hill.  We toured my domain at rapid pace, snaking across the forest as I hid my presence in her wake.  I had enough experience avoiding her, of course.  She was the constant danger that loomed on my mind as I lived my days.  If I did not avoid her, we would fight, and she, bigger than I, would in her crazy-eyed fervor strive to kill me.  I always imagined I would win, but I never wanted to test it.  I never wanted to find that result.

My fur was becoming drenched in sweat and rain as I ran.  I had spotted her a few times on the higher points when the lighting fell, and some in the ravines where she slipped like a shadow.  She seemed driven by the storm in the same way I was, chasing some invisible prey.  snapping out at the light and the rain.  It gave me a comfort in my loneliness that there was someone out there, similarly alone, similarly driven.  She reached the top of the tallest hill, barren of trees or anything else.  Just slabs of rock piled high up toward the offending storm.  Her howl pierced the wind and the rain.  It carried through the forest in a way that mimicked the rain's own oppressiveness.  The end was drowned out by thunder, though it almost seemed to pierce that too.  The lightning that came down was the answer she waited for, though.  It stabbed towards her head, towards her open mouth.  It was aimed in a way it had not been before.  She bit down with her teeth, sinking her canines into it deeply, ripping it down from the sky.  It was dazzling, brighter than any lightning I had seen before.  It was also longer.  My eyes saw white in the seconds and minutes thereafter.  When I could see again, she still stood, but now over a glowing form that dripped its blood across and down the rocks.  The lightning itself was her hunt, and she had killed it there.  From where I stood in the shadows of the trees, I could see the shape had legs and horns and a grand tail.  It would stand taller than us, if it could have stood.  That grand beast was her prey and she started to feast, now ignoring the storm that fizzled around her, going through the motions as it dwindled away to nothing.  I would return later.  It pained me, somehow, to see a beast so tremendous brought low.

Two suns passed and I returned, climbing up the sharp hill.  The area had been deserted, it smelled like lightning still, sharp and cutting.  The corpse of the thing was stripped clean of meat, her voracious appetite put to test and found victorious.  The bones were scattered around, and the pelt still shone with white light.  Its horns seemed to pulse, vaguely, as I paced through the scene.  The blood had hardened into streams of clear rock that filled cracks in the stone.  I found myself picking the bones up, stacking them together at the center of the peak.  I draped the hide over it and stacked the skull and antlers at the top.  Then I waited.  It was the rainy season.  Two more suns passed.  I hungered, but I knew another storm would come soon.  My nose told me, and the wind carried it to me.  The second night grew clouds and threw down wind and rain.  It ran off the pile of bones I sat beside, chilling me through my fur.  I did not have to wait long for the lightning and thunder to make their way to the hill.  It happened much the same way.  The lightning came down, the thunder boomed, and I was blind.  My nose stung with the lightnings scent, more powerful that it was before.  When I saw again, another of the creatures stood there, overlooking the pile.  It was taller, larger.  I would have reached to it's chest if I had stood.  Through the glow it put off I saw its legs tense.  It lept up, thunder booming as the stones cracked below it.  The lightning ascended.  The pile was still there, glowing more intensely than before.  I stood, walking towards it.  The sound rang out again, thunder..  Lightning flashed.  I felt the smell of lightning all around me.  It smothered me in a way the rain might dream to.  When I could see again, the glow was gone from the bones, from the hide.

I turned to make my way back down the hill, and somehow in she shadows I saw her.  Around her seemed a cloak of darker black, like an angry storm cloud.  She bared her teeth at me, a low growl rumbling from below me.  I could see a light shining down towards her, radiating from the hill.  I cast no shadow as I walked to meet her.  To kill her.

An Unpleasant Job

The surgery had gone well. Minor scaring around the iris that would smooth out in a few hours, but that was better than most who went through it could say.  The man with blue hair edged himself off the operating slab in darkness.  With his right hand he groped for the eye-patch left on the table.  He would be sensitive for a while longer, maybe a day, before everything would be working perfectly.  Meanwhile he fumbled with knotting the cloth strap behind his head, fingers still tingling from the restart of his life-support system as it poked around through his veins and nerves for damage.  If the cyber-doc had done his work properly, the new blueprint for his right eye would be integrated with the system and it shouldn't take apart the expensive modifications as it woke up.  The man wasn't thinking of that, though.  The doc had a reputation for honest, if mostly illegal, dealings.  His thoughts were on the job the new eye was for in the first place.  He might have managed with the standard package he had installed years ago if not for the complications he had found out about after taking the money.  Not enough money for something like this, really, but the job might pay off in perks or fame.  Messing with a royal battalion on home ground was gutsy to say the least.  Stealing things from right under their noses when some foreign dignitary was visiting was worse.  Having to steal the foreign dignitary that they would doubtless be guarding would be considered insanity.  That would of course be why the client would have hired him to do it.  As opposed to the doc's solid reputation, the man's was like fire, flickering and bending and burning things it touched.  The job had come through multiple layers of obfuscation to his brooding form in a low-down pub three weeks ago.  It had asked if he would abduct a woman for a sum of money.  He had been running low on cash, accepted after too shallow of a background check.  It had come through channels that gave him easy jobs in the past and that had lulled him into a false sense of security.  Vinney would be off his white list and back onto the grey for the next while for this one.  As it was, when he got the background, not the full background, but at least a fractured facsimile, he had needed new eyes.  Going in blind was out.  Knowing what hid behind each synthetic skin and chromed holster would be what kept him alive long enough to make it out when things went wrong.  In the dark, he knew his plan was foolproof, each step taking him closer in through the underground halls to a room designed for the comfort of political guests, and then stepping him back out with one more person.  It would go wrong though, and he knew this too.  He expected to execute something poorly, to have missed key information, or to just be damn unlucky.  Two days later, in the middle of the job, it did not come in the manner that he expected.

She was waiting for him as he walked in the room.  His disguise, a perfectly tailored royal battalion issue uniform did not give him away.  His accent was perfect.  The reason for opening the door and entering had been established as an escort.  She knew, somehow, and what scared him was that he didn't know how.  Things went wrong: this was a law of operating.  When you did not know how things went wrong, only that they were was when bad things happened to people in his profession.  It was this that caused him to uncharacteristically freeze up in the doorway as she smiled at him daintily, the tips of her lips curling up ever so slightly into something just shy of a gloat.  She knew, had said so as soon as he closed the door.  That he was there to kidnap her, to disappear her from the midst of a heavily armed installation near the heart of the empire.  She said he might succeed.  She wasn't worried, or if she was she hid it behind a smooth surface of amusement.  He was off schedule, precious seconds wasted.  The pause breaks as she rises from the couch, picking up her purse, shielded so heavily even his new eye can make nothing out but smudges.  "Let's go," she says with a giggle.

They walk.  He follows a memorized pathway, recalculating everything as he moves.  Seconds mean position changes and speed changes.  Different passcodes for doors and cameras and elevators.  He is not lost though every hallway looks the same; grey-green carpet and crimson banners hung on cream walls.  Sharp, square turns and zig-zagging patterns through a colossal labyrinth.  They meet no one.  He is still panicking.  He takes moments to glance behind him, he smile static on the face of someone who should not know they are being kidnapped.  No, not kidnapped if they follow knowingly, he thinks.  He is being used, somehow, he imagines.  They walk, muffled footfalls and giggles.

Hallways, stairwell, parking garrage, small inconspicuous car.  Plans adjusted for the seconds and executed flawlessly.  The new eye keeps them out of the way of company.  It was a good investment.  The car is on the freeway when the wrongness finally clicks into place.  Her purse shimmers in the rear-view mirror and the shielding melts away.  Enough in it to vaporize the car and anything within basic-human spitting distance of the exterior.  The trigger is rigged to some remote detonation signal.  The listener is set and primed to go off.  She hasn't stopped giggling every minute or two.  All he can do is drive, hostage.  A click, the door, not the bomb his muscles tense for.  She lazily dangles it by three, two, one fingers and drops it.  It takes a second and a half before the purse begins to detonate, two before the car gets rocketed forward, riding the shockwave.  The back window is cracked into a spiderweb pattern, and he can't hear for the next minute of driving.  His foot is jamming the gas to the floor the whole time.  It's a half hour and most of a city away before she makes another sound that he can hear.  "What's next, before they figure out what happened?"

The Lazarus Halls.

Like a sunrise, the lights eased on in the long hallways of the cargo hold.  A dull glow along the floor between brighter cylinders that fell through a few, largely separated, holes in the ceiling.  Along the sides of the many rows were doors.  Metal with no windows, a keypad just below shoulder height, and a seal around the bottom.  Behind these doors people were waking up.  They were done being cargo at this point, woken from a deep freeze to get up from their dead popsicle state and crowd out into the halls.  That would happen in the next few hours, perhaps sooner for some of the more hardy ones.  Needles and pills and electronic voices that informed them of how well the voyage had gone were their present state.  They also needed to get dressed, though in their haze of waking the voice had to prompt some more than others that it was in fact mandatory before unlocking the door.  So they pulled on pants and shirts, zipped up jackets, and walked like the exhausted down the long straight halls.  The ladders positioned on the walls under the light-cylinders were like insurmountable obstacles to them.  The voice told them they must go up, but braced against the cold metal walls, almost too tired to walk, they just looked blankly at the things.  The man who designed the ship and the waking process, almost guaranteed to be dead after so many hundreds of millenia, had underestimated the toll on the body.  Eventually the voice went silent, asking the captain what it must do to get them to cooperate.  The ship hummed to itself, lightening the spin of its core.  Gravity relaxed, letting the men and women straighten up.  A few looked to the holes in the ceiling then.  Some would take more time than others, but now slowly progress resumed.  Hand over hand, minute after minute and finally they began to reach the top of the ladder, twice the height of the ceiling that sat just out of hand-reach.  It was a neutral light on the ladders, not cold but without the warmth of any feeling.  The ship was made when feelings were cast aside for greater goals of survivability and thus reflected its creator's mind at the time.  The one consideration that was put in waited above.  Hardened translucent metal hulling stretched the far wall of the gigantic room they stood in.  Before they awoke it had been scrubbed of radiation, flooded with manufactured oxygen, and un-sealed from the rest of the ship.  A troublesome process, but the view warmed them as the ascended.  A bright yellow sphere on the horizon with small blue specks on the opposite wall.  They let out short gasps and moans, letting out more of an emotion than an idea, drawn forward to the hull like zombies to a feast.  Only a few of the thousands sleeping below had awoken, just enough to throw a seed to the blue specks behind them.  The first seed of many in this solar system.

Home.

Cold dark streaming in the windows greeted him as he walked onto the bridge.  Space was filled with tiny mites of light that shone across countless light years yet each mattered little to him.  Even the small light barely visible to the human eye that glimmered in the distance was a past that meant little to him.  He had thrown it away with his journey, tossed the prospect of life on a familiar planet with a familiar sun away into the darkness he had crossed through.  His gaze was drawn to the empty blackness that surrounded those lights.  It shifted between a flatness and an infinite abyss before his eyes, pushing and pulling at his conceptual awareness.  He identified with it.  His eyes shone not with the light of the stars but with the blank depth of the void.  It was a light that drew him back out as it blinked to life on the panels below him.  He could vaguely recall their meanings after the deep slumber, slowly moving his head downwards to inspect their polygonal shapes more closely.  With a sigh he slumped into the chair of the bridge, letting instinctive movements guide his hands to the controls.  For his body it seemed like barely a year had gone by.  It was the thing that lurked within him, the spirit that held his head aloft that was weary.  He scratched at buttons and switches, playing a game with the lights to settle them back down to black blankness.  The ship turned, silent and slow as the internal gravitational engines twisted and turned deep within the hull.  It was moments before the light of a star crept into view, moments more of an almost-darkness.  The light was a low yellow, splashing its way into the bridge and bathing the captain with warmth.  It shined deep into his being, the light he had come to claim.  His emptiness was marred, filled with a fragment of purpose that buoyed his form.  Yellow beams pressed him backwards and upwards against the chair, straightening him.  There were more spaces, vast spaces within him that were not filled still, more expanses that resonated with the void, and in time they might be filled too, but for now there was only the small yellow glow that sparkled its way into his eyes that mattered.  A bright spot at the center of his universe.

A thing in the shape of a horse.

Fevered dreams lay above the grown man, smothering him just as much as the blankets that clung to his sweaty skin.  In the darkness he rolled from one side to another, letting out intermittent moans as if to summon somebody, anybody to help him.  Nobody would hear, or course, the house was his and his alone, visited by others infrequently enough that he had stopped cleaning up the dust that clung to his drapes and sat atop his dresser, counter tops, and furniture.  There was however a something in the room with him.  It wasn't quite thoughtful enough as to be considered a person, and if he were to startle awake he would not have even seen it, large as it was.  No, the deep midnight-blue horse that stood in his room, watching him, was passing through the neighborhood and had happened on a particularly delicious scent as it enjoyed the starlight of the cobbled lane.  It was just a short hop through the walls, sniffing as it went and it had arrived here, in the room.  It licked the air, tasting the distress, the musk of the sweat mixed with the low grunts of discontent and fear.  Perhaps it would have stayed until morning cracked the lids of his eyes through a small slit in the curtains.  A jingle on its silver-dyed collar would pull it away though, just as the clock was turning towards one in the morning.  It's master was impatient.  With a final glance at the contorted form, the Nightmare pranced through the wall as if it were not even there, falling daintily from the second story of the house to land on the street below.  The beast knew its way home, it had passed the time in this antiquated section of town many nights when it was given the chance and been called in just the same way barely less times.  The second ring was traditional as well, five minutes after the first.  The master was of course in a hurry as usual.  Very few nights was the beast able to trot home before the second ring, but it had escaped the third ring of the bell so far.  It was a creature of magic and knew what a third ring might mean, and in so knowing somewhere deep within its bones it quickened its trot to a gallop, furrowing the brows of sleepers within earshot of the horse-shaped being as it wove its way through the zig-zaging streets.  It passed cars and streetlights and dark windows as it ran, seen by nothing, for nothing out on the streets was magic enough to even touch the world that it belonged to.  The only one to acknowledge its presence was the grey-haired old man who waited for it, bell raised in his pale hand and a scowl that seemed etched into his wrinkled features.  The beast walked forward with lowered head, pretending a humility it and its master knew it lacked, but the pretense counted enough that its tardiness would be ignored once again.  The old man, lowered the bell, muffling the clapper with his hand and stuffed it deep within one of his many coat-pockets.  Merely gesturing towards the garage, he reached into another pocket producing a pipe and matches.  The beast fulfilled its part of the ritual, walking through the garage doors and backing into the waiting carriage harness.  Leather straps slithered like snakes upon its skin, clasping themselves and encircling the beast's body.  Such things had long ago ceased to startle the beast, and it waited in silence for the contraption to finish before dragging it through the garage door it had entered, horse and carriage both slipping through like ghosts.  The man simply nodded, pulling himself up onto the driver's bench and pulling the reigns.  It was a dark night and the beast's master had duties to attend to.

Encouragement.

Even when life is about to break, live a little.

When your heart can only feel the ache, live a little.

In the long weeks when noon-day sun is dark and grey

Feel the colors deep inside you quake.  Live a little.

Ripped in pieces small as post-its by packed schedules,

You must melt back smooth as if a lake.  Live a little.

Empty and alone, curled up tight and sobbing mute,

Reach out, don't fear for what is at stake.  Live a little.

Within souls all these deep sorrows, holding me down too,

Let's light sparks for happiness' sake and live a little.

The Phoenix

Flat and featureless a great plain,

stretched to the horizon.

White sheets track a wandering trail

we cannot keep eyes on.

Far ahead the lone man wanders

searching the blank canvas

for the setting sun in its nest,

eyes dripping with sadness.

Where rests the evening phoenix bright

that once flew south to him?

Where nests his summer lover fair,

fled here as if by whim?

He walks for days, or months, or years.

Yet still the darkened gloom

pervades the air with stale despair.

The plain is there his tomb.

His tracks erase behind his path

no sooner heartbeat cease.

His final breath takes at last,

yet still he has no peace.

In spectral form he floats e're on,

his journey not complete.

A chill sticks firm to his clear skin.

The sun he can not meet.

Some say those lover's destiny

is not to reunite,

but if his flaming love can reach

her soul will surely light.

A streaming pillar shooting up

to heaven with rebirth,

their souls entwined in passion's flame.

A phoenix born on earth.

But we no more can see his trail,

can follow through the snow

no more.  So back we to our work;

forget his tale of woe.

The wilderness within me.

I burn them in my heart

tossing them upon the fire

within

to keep my love burning.

Brunette, Blonde, and Coal-black; hair

sizzling as they combust,

releasing tongues that gobble up

their selves.

Age means nothing. The oldest

thrown there are both burned

to ash

or great logs

ready to crackle into the

night for decades hence,

fed by memories.

I see the colors clash, orange and

blue and green all flickering

up flames from the respective

souls I Immolate.

They never fully drown each-other

out though each has flared

brighter

in its time.

I need these lights, dangerous

in their destruction as I sit

in a bubble, wrapped

in darkness.

My own soul huddles closer to

the coals as it

runs low,

smoking.

Perhaps some facsimile of me

burns in someone else's fire

somewhere, and this thought

warms me.

Life

Green follows them like

a shadow and quickly overtakes them;

it quickly surrounds them in a green circle.

This circle appears and disappears quickly,

holding them together in a circle fleetingly and

today I think they like-like Green.

Nobody  I like quickly has green.

Green and the like

desert them that I like and

desire and circle around them.

A circle, like a whirlpool, green doesn't quickly

spiral down. As quickly I forget them and the slow circle.

Rush quickly and circle

the right answer. Remember like yesterday.  Circle letters.  Green

circles weeks later correct me.  I hate them.  Write quickly.

 face green with envy seeing people on the green grass like

they have no worries and  I want to be like them.

I might join them if I finish quickly.  Just one more page and...

Us or them, we circle each-other and

quickly commence our battle.  Once green, the field we circle.

Our feet pound and we quickly churn up mud with them.

Play like war.  War-like play.  Shins stained green.

Green jerseys for them, red like

blood for us.  Black and white circle kicked fast and chased quickly.

A bright circle of green lets us roll quickly.

I speak to them like usual and

we pass another green light.  Conversation lulls and I like

to quickly compose my thoughts.  I watch them and thoughts circle

my head like a fish in a bowl.  Quickly we decelerate. Green

lights turn yellow and circle back through red as I talk to them.

You eat them because they're healthy and you like them,

pushing them in a circle before scarfing them down quickly.

I like the circle, but the dull green

taste of them quickly spoils my appetite and

I quickly excuse myself and circle

the buffet, avoiding the green peas for the green jello I do like.

To be like them

is to circle endlessly while quickly

forgetting and indoctrinating those who are still green.

Reliquary

or when all is over, done,

while snow beams fall in light,

for curtains hide thy dying sun.

Shore of ancient battles won,

vile deeds stain honor at the sight,

or when all is over, done.

Floor slick with snow save one

tile, mopped clean and bright.

Four curtains hide thy dying sun.

Your irises once kind now shun.

I'll vanish in the dark of night,

or when all is over, done.

Swore on the pact, the gun;

Smile through the screaming blight,

for curtains hide thy dying sun.

Nor will my feet begin to run,

guile tossed away, and slight.

Or when all is over, done

for. Curtains.  Hide thy dying son.

Dawn

Such a doomed romance is there

between Sir Beard the coarse and old

and Lady Coffee, young and fair,

that steams quite hot 'till love runs cold.

He catches but a drop or two

as cosmic forces bring them near

and pass her gleaming, bitter dew

between her cup and lips she'll sear.

Yet faster she will out of sight

be drawn as cooling passion dies

and sad Sir Beard a vestige keep

between his bristles nestled deep

until night washes clean his prize

and yearns he for the morning light.

A Burning

Improve what man

with careless mind

has broken here

in one mistake.

Consuming fire

that eats what we,

in folly tried

to fashion "God".

Behind is just

a charred remain;

its creaking moan

intermittent.

Spreading across

the blackened wood,

biotic blades

of green return.

A Poem on a Journey.

It's a long long way from home my friend

the moonlit night at summer's end
when simple silver light doth wend

through crooked branch and falling leaves.

Looking back past lonesome roads

we traveled bearing heavy loads

while our desire behind us goads

with promises of home's warm fire.

For certain she who loves us grieves

the same as when we took our leaves

and now she only misconceives

our paths forever parted.

Perhaps when spring again retire

after winter and its ire

and summer once more starts entire,

our half-walked journey then retrace

A place in mind that when we started

even now our course has charted

past unknown trials to fainthearted

hidden just behind that bend.

In few short days we find the place

since now we will increase our pace

to see it sooner, face to face.

Yet it's a long long way back to our abodes.

Not about vikings, but still snow.

Intricacies of a highest order is what they are in the purest form.  Not the highest order, as if there were one, or as if there were but one which pertained to us.  They exist as a tangled rope, a kind of metaphysical Gordian knot, or would if we found them alone and unspoiled.  As I said, their purest form would be such as that.  As they are, having penetrated our sphere of being, which exists in the most unspherical way poissible, you might liken them to a ghost.

Walking into those northern woods at night would lend your eye no notion that she was even there.  She exists as one of these mottled entities that call our world home, and those knowledgeable enough to recognize her existence are unable to really pin down her thoughts.  We know her as old lady winter, for she is aged and she is cold.  When I was younger, I did take that trip into the forest in search of her.  I had heard the tales of the legions that thought the woods would be a shortcut around the mountains and oceans that otherwise ring this country.  All that most scholars say on the matter is they never came out.  Some brave enough to theorize say they came down with sickness or disease when they traveled through, or perhaps were unprepared for local wildlife as of yet unknown.  The bards string along tales of lost cities of great magic such that the tall towers of our empire would be awed to shame.

I had heard but one tale of old lady winter in all the tales that were thrown around, and by a most curious sort.  The lowest of the beggars, clad in little more than scraps of burlap whilst sitting in the street.  Of all the accounts, he was the only one to have actually claimed to venture in and back out of those woods, though quite a few expeditions had made known their intent at the former.  He said he saw a ghost of a great lady, all frosted over and walking through the dark parts of the forest, surveying her kingdom.  With a bit of a tremor in his voice he finished his tale with a short rasp. "I fled."

So into the trees and snow I strode with a pack on my shoulders and a pipe in my mouth.  It was two days in when I noticed the trees rise taller around me as I dragged my feet through knee-deep snowdrifts.  In a land of continual winter, the trees were mostly scraggly things, growing up out of the hard ground and spurting up on the few days it would thaw to let water flow down into their roots.  Here though they began to climb higher into the sky and clump closer together, weaving their needled limbs together into a great canopy atop the sky.  I walked in wonder, asking myself why nobody had talked of such trees as this, for surely some had ventured deep as I had.  The thought did not quite reach my young and brash brain that few would make it back out again but those who traveled alone and quietly.

I would draw out the sights I had see that day by campfire-light upon the few sheets of parchment I had taken with me before settling in to warm furs through the night.  I had at first been worried about wolves or bears menacing me on my journey, but the farther I walked inwards the fewer signs of life I found there.  By the third day I hardly ever heard a bird, much less saw tracks of any kind besides my own.

It was the fifth night before the forest really awoke with what I would deep as its great power.  A long day of walking and staring at the thick forest and the ever increasing gloom that was nestled within it left me to find suitable wood to make my fire, a task harder than it would seem.  The underbrush was surely flourishing, but where other forests might have a good deal of old and fallen trees or a few broken branches there was nothing but grass and bushes and rocks and snow.  I was driven to chopping off low hanging branches from the trees themselves to fuel my fire.

The ground, of course, was not dry, so I had taken to the habit of building up a pyre and letting it burn down into the ground and steam up the snow beneath throughout the night.  It was a great surprise to see the fire expose a ground littered in bones when it did indeed burn down to the frozen ground.  I had felt the ground grow more rocky over the later half of the day, but I reflected later when I had returned that the field I found myself in, must stretch a few miles in diameter, if not more.  The bones were not naked, surrounded by rusted metal that had all but been erased by time, and scraps of cloth and leather that made up their uniforms.  Not all of them were the same, and I counted up to three different insignia on helmets and belt-buckles and shields before I had the sense to pack my things and head back away out of the place.

It was nearing midnight by then, and a few frail beams of moonlight had pierced the canopy to guide my way, though I also carried my torch aloft to find my tracks.  I walked through the night, though I had not made my way to dawn before the second disturbing thing happened to me that night.  I felt a prickle in my neck, and after walking a few more steps I gave in to the temptation and looked backwards to, as I thought in the moment, 'relieve my overactive mind of strange fantasies'.

She was standing there, all in white and at least ten feet tall.  Her eyes were white and her skin was white and her gown was whiter than white could seem to be.  Her steps wove her through the trees, and as she walked towards my petrified form I could feel the air harden in cold around me.  It was an instinct when I went to cross my arms and huddle against the cold, but the rattling stopped me before the chains did.  They were thin things at first, and clear, but the shackles swelled with the cold.  They held by hands together, and my feet, and more grew up to chain me to tree-branches that were close enough.

By the time she had arrived facing me, I was immobile and would have violently shivered had I the leeway.  Her face was expressionless, as if it were untouched with any emotion having chained me up.  There was not even the hint of boredom you might expect.  I lost sight of her as she paced around behind me, moving smoothly through the chains which rippled as she interposed herself in their space.  When she had made a circuit, I saw her holding one of my sheets of drawings in a spot of moonlight.  I swear that for but a moment she smiled the smallest smile that I ever saw.  Then she was walking away through the trees again, back deeper into her winter realm.  It was still before dawn when the chains melted off.

I did not make it very far with stiffened limbs and chattering teeth before the dawn greeted me.  The rest of my trip back was cold, but uneventful.  I never had the same level of circulation as I once did, still frozen on the inside by that encounter.  The years since I have guessed and second guessed why I survived that night unlike the thousands and more that never walk out of those woods.  What I know of their kind that exist in this world tells me it stands beyond my comprehension, that my eyes were playing tricks on me and she didn't smile at all, yet I can't shake the memory no matter how hard I try.

Anyway, stay out of those woods if you know what's good for you.  Every year some more people go in there and never come out, though by now the armies have stopped trying to cross it.  Perhaps in another few decades some general will be stupid enough to lead his troops within, but even without a tale of the old lady of winter the histories speak of the poor choice it would be.

Viking Tales Part 1

Never would you hear them come in sun or light weather, their ships bright and warm by golden rays.  No, these men came in with the weather, said to be as much a part of it as the rain and snow.  So too that day when they landed their boats outside town, cracking sails shedding ice and snow in the wind.  The sun would not peek through, even at noon, and stayed away in what I might say was fear of the men who road the sea in the bellies of what could only be described as their monster boats.

Each of the three was cut of wood as black as burning bone, each coated with shimmering ice and sticking frost.  Along the rails the shapes of hungry birds, wings outstretched to overlap, the masts wrapped round with serpents, and the figurehead on the front a terrible beast reaching out to rip the ocean itself asunder just as they had many unfortunate vessels that got in the way; one a bear, one a wolf, and one an unnamed beast with horns like an elk and fangs of a viper.  These too were carved in black and painted by the sky with dustings of white.

Of the inside and the deck itself, none but the sailors who sail it would see up upon it, so I know not of what fierce designs pull themselves from the woodwork there.  From these ships three came forth the fierce men who we shared mead with that night.  Each one upon his face a beard of white, either snow or age to color it, and each one also had upon his shoulders a cloak of deepest blue that frozen stiff would creak and crack as they moved along.

With shining coin and plundered sheep, they plied from our small tavern drink to fill the mugs of every man, grinning and laughing with smiles sharp enough to cut a man and laughter that would bury him.  I sat deep within the corner there as was my habit late in nights after long days fishing.  It was from there that I overheard their stories, and of these I shall relate to you with the detail I can with the ale flowing so switftly within me then.

The first tale that started was led by a small man with a rough eyepatch  under his helm of iron and a thick spear of the same that leaned up against his chair.  Strong was he to carry such with the ease he did, and when he spoke the sense of drama was even stronger that the jokes and laughs of the men 'round him hushed away and a small circle of silence took the table he sat at.

"Have I ever told you lads about the firs' sea serpent I wrestled?" he asked.  Heads turned his way.  Some smiles and a few nods, some shakes of the head and curious grins from the men around him.  "Well I'm gon ta tell it the proper way this time.  Less talk of the battle before, less of the honors after, for you all better know those at lest by now."

"Aye, we do, an we've heard the story of how you lost your eye mor'n this 'un." said one of the smilers across the table in the shadow.   He was large, well muscled, and knew how to carry his weight to impress.

"Tha' was the secon' sea serpent, aye.  At tha' time I was grown on by ten years an' more crafty, or so I thought then."  He raised his mug and drained it before going on.  "But the serpent a'in't the start o' my story. the great burning of the gold fleet is."

Round the table faces turn more solemn and slow nods draw their eyes deep into the oceans of their mead.  Even I knew the tale, being a man of the sea. "The golden fleet was set a'fire deep in winter, back at the last meetin' of the clans, back what goes a good sixty turns a the seasons.  I saw them ships, piled high with looted gold and treasures stole from every coast we know, saw 'em flare in the night, from ship to ship it spread until our captains cut the lines and set us three ships adrift."

With that he motioned with his empty mug over toward the youngest of the group at the table.  "And if I'm to start in on the heavy part I need more mead."  It took a moment before he got up, wordlessly, and longer before he was back with a full mug.  The rest of the group looked like they were brooding over it.  Men from the clans were said to have lost half their relatives that day.

"Now if it weren't enough tha' the fire spread, but there were the looters tha' came after.  Our little fleet ran into some and sank the bastards 'fore they got there, but we were sore and tired, afraid to see what dawn would show where burning wood would not.  I had watch tha' nigh', and with eyes either blinded by tears or the fires, I didn' notice the dark shape in the water.  This'd be the part where I tell you I got grabbed, drug under and stabbed it to death 'fore swimming back up on board.  I said it like tha' most times, and most times I ge' those looks of disbelief.  So I go' to thinkin', if I'm gonna talk and get disbelieved, migh' as well do i' with the real tale."  All the eyes of the table do have that look about them, but knowing what I know today, I'd say half of them really wanted to believe what he'd say next.

"First a all, I weren't grabbed, I was eaten."

A short interlude that doubtless occurred on some lake, somewhere, sometime.

Y'know son, I've always though I figured out the secret to fishin' right about round your age.

That is was boring and pointless and miserable and cold out on this leaky boat of yours?

See, I always figured when I was young that it was all about the fish.

And we barely packed anything to eat.  Four sandwiches to last us for however long you plan on keeping us out here.

You'd think that, yes, what with fish bein' in the title and all, but they're more of a happy afterthought, a side effect of the true entertainment hidden within the pasttime.

Yeah, entertaining, sure.

What it's really about is relaxing, letting yourself just be.  Becoming one with the nature around you and all its beauty.

What if nature freezes me dead first, eh pops?

It's a meditative state, a state in which you can truly learn patience and wisdom.

Riiiiight.  Wisdom.

Yes my boy, wisdom.  Take the fishing pole itself.  Maybe you think that I just picked a side of the boat at random to cast my line off.

Yes, actually.  Why wouldn't you?  It's the same water for about a mile in every direction.

No, in fact, this was through design, fueled by purpose.

And I suppose you want me to ask you what that purpose is?

You're learning wisdom in leaps and bounds, you are.  You see, while it may all seem the same if you just look at the surface of the water, but take a closer look.

The shadow of the boat?

No no, closer.  It's water, there's nothing different.

There is a very obvious difference here, my boy, you just have to look for it.

. . .

Come on, take another guess.

. . .that patch there is maaaaaagical water with the mysterious properties of maaaaaagical fish magic, despite the fact that we've been out here for four hours and there's been no bites at all.

Really?

. . .

Well, no.  I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about.  Is it one of those newfangled teen things?

No dad, it was sarcasm.

No need for that out here, surrounded by the beauty of nature.

Right, beauty.  It looks like a giant flat lake filled with water.

But look at the reflections, and the mountains in the background.  Hear the clapping of the waves and the woosh of the wind.

The wind trying to give me frostbite?

Wonder at the clouds in their puffy shapes.  That one looks like a pillow, I reckon.

It's cloud shaped.

Well, aren't all clouds?

. . .

Anyway, that brings me to my point.  You didn't guess it, but here it is.  I picked this side of the boat because it has a nice view of the mountain over there with the little glaciers on it and the steep rock face.

Are we almost done here?

Isn't it a nice pretty red on the face of the cliff there.  Really, I think it brings out the green of the pine trees that kinda hang on to the side.

. . .

C'mon son, enjoy yourself.  We've got all day out here.

Uuuuuuuugh.