Time Flies when you're having Fun.

Spinning, the coin scattered light around the room before falling back down behind the counter.  A soft smack of metal on skin.  It was a golden coin, well polished with the face of some long-forgotten empress on one side and a laurel wreath decorating the other.  "Heads again, huh?"

The man sitting behind the counter shifted the coin back and forth, playing with it in his hand before flicking it up towards the ceiling again.  Free of the shadows, once again the coin lit up in the light of the old fashioned chandelier that hung in the center of the room.  Then at gravity's behest, the coin fell swiftly down again into the man's waiting palm.

He was middle aged, though he had a bearing and a smile that made him seem young at a glance.  He sat leaning back, feet up on the desk while the top of the chair braced against the door right behind him.  slightly disheveled, his white button up shirt stood out against the dark brown wood grain of the room, though the sleeves and shoulders were covered by a serviceable, black jacket.  His slacks were almost a matching shade, complimenting the look with a kind of a fashionable wink.  All of it had slight wrinkles, the type that was smoothed over after the clothing had been put on in the rush to get out the door, though the man behind the counter didn't seem the type to rush anywhere.  On his feet were plain, brown boots, but the light sort that you could get around in as opposed to anything heavy.

The rest of the room was empty besides a door on the far wall and a single chair facing the desk, a sister chair of the one the man sat in.  The room was large enough to pace in, but not quite large enough that it felt overly empty.  The sound of traffic seeped through the wooden door opposite the man, though it was muted and distant.

Over and over the man just flipped the coin up, waited, and caught it.  It had come up heads the past two hundred tosses, which rather annoyed him.  It was a boring way to pass the time after all, and here his coin was acting up again.  It was bad enough that heads was an affirmative of if he should stay in the room and keep flipping the coin.  Every fifty or so flips he would switch it up and change the question slightly.  "Is there a reason that I should be in here so late?"  Heads.  "An important reason?"  Heads.  "Can I leave now?"  Tails. "Is this just some sort of mind game?"  Tails. Heads. Tails, Tails, Tails. And on and on.  Currently he had stuck to "Am I still supposed to just wait?" as his go to time waster.  And it was approaching two hundred and fifty consecutive tosses.

Just as he sent the coin up again, a man in a black hoodie threw the door open and stumbled in.  He looked exhausted, just a little bit entirely frightened, and had his right hand suspiciously jammed into his pocket.
"Can I help you?" asked the man behind the counter, distracted enough to let the coin drop to the floor.  Under the desk, out of sight of either of the two men, the coin bounced, twirled, and then came to a rest perfectly balanced on its side.

In the Concrete Jungle of the Night

Of all the things that I thought would go wrong tonight, the tiger is by far the strangest.  Sure, a store might have alarms, cameras, locking windows, that type of stuff, but a tiger?  That was new.  Worse than that, it not only embodies my fear of large predative felines, it happens to be some sort of ghost tiger too.

I got in the window easily enough, it was a cheap window on the shop, and I'd seen no security cameras last week when I'd cased it.  Just in case I was wearing a hood and a mask.  An Abe Lincoln mask, which I thought was a nice touch, what with my intent to "free" some property tonight.  It was an old, worn down shop in chinatown, the kind where you're not sure what half of the things even are, but I'd had my eye on some of the more expensive looking jewelry, and maybe a sword or two if my dufflebag would fit them, which it had.

The swords had not been the problem, they came off the shelves from behind the counter and slid easily into the bag.  The problem came when I picked up the necklace.  It looked old, Buddhist, but it was still polished and fancy looking.  Thing was, I head a low, deep growl when it left the shelf.  Maybe the "not for sale" sign next to it should have tipped me off.  Anyway, I knew enough to say that that was a very bad sign, so I bolted to the door.

I really shouldn't have looked back.  Slinking out from behind the counter, the tiger growled again.  The door wasn't locked, that was the first thing I'd done once I was in through the window, just in case I needed to get away quick.  Fear always seemed to make me think faster, thankfully, so the door was open, locked, then shut again and I bolted.  Farther down the street, I looked back again.  One of those reflex things that's half curiosity, half wishful thinking.

My eyes met the tiger's as it walked through the door.  It wasn't breaking through the wood or smashing the door open, it was simply walking through it.  Now I'm trying to outrun a tiger that can walk through walls through the streets of chinatown in the middle of the night with just a sliver of moonlight to guide me.  If I thought it would help, I'd probably be screaming right now.

Corners don't stop it, it just cuts them, though they do give me cover from its eyes.  Rather sure that it would pick me up by scent if it ever lost me for more than a second.  Pure adrenaline is the only thing that's helping me on the straightaway.  Still, it's catching up.  My best bet is to get back home and get my car and then get to the highway.  That's two more miles though.  Uphill.

I can hear it growling back there, so it hasn't lost me yet.  I'm drenched under my mask, under my shirt, in my shoes.  Each step I take, each short breath could be my last.  Tigers are fast.  I know the area though, the zigzags.  I practiced in case of police.  I figured I'd only use one or two, depending on where I was, but every single one on the way is a few more seconds of life.

My heart is going to collapse in another minute of this, my steps only slightly behind its pace.  Probably breaking some Olympic records here.  More growls. Closer.  There is no way that I'm outpacing this thing on my own.  It's gotta be toying with me.  It wants the necklace, but I think it knows that it can catch me.

Maybe If I let go of the thing?  Yeah, I'll just.  What?  Ok, it's stuck.  Stuck to my hand.  And glowing.  This is getting worse and worse by the minute.  I can hear the footfalls behind me now.  Closer to the house though.  Car's just up there, sitting in the street.  Do I have enough room to get it started?  Wind sprint at the end or nothing.
Key.

Door.

Ignition.

Growl.

First Gear.

Second.

Ripping rubber.

Flat tire, courtesy of the tiger.

Third Gear.

Barely driving straight.

Receding in the rear-view mirror.

And now it's just standing still.  Safety.  Freedom.  Oh crap, I forgot my dufflebag.

Sunset on the Fear-Filled Past: A Moon to Guide the Children of the Future.

Hurrying back through the forest, Carolus pulled his feathered cloak closer around his body.  It was a bright day, but so little of the sun's rays penetrated the treetops, evergreen roofs supported by wooden pillars.  It was approaching the equinox, and the snow turned the whole area white, obscuring his path back to the village.

Well, city would be a better term for it, but Carolus would always remember the village he knew and loved.  Trade had boomed after construction of the well.  That hole in the land, a land impervious to downwards movement past a a few span, stretched down and down.  The sheer tower that stretched down into the earth was a marvel.

A dangerous marvel the previous elders had said.  They had kept the whole village away from it, formed a great walled circle around the hilltop it existed on.  They feared to close it up though.  There had been prophecies, he had heard, though the elders had kept them to themselves, written them down on scrolls and hidden them away in their huts.  They had hoarded away the knowledge and spread rumors of boogeymen coming out of the hole to scare off the curious.  And then they died.

The fire had spread through the village burning homes indiscriminately, like a wave washing up the beach until the land was smooth again.  He still heard the screams of the burned in his head, still remembered sitting in the ashes of his home, wondering what he could do to survive.  That winter had been a hard one, though not quite as nippy as this chill he fled through on his way back from the southern kingdoms.

Walking ahead of him, the sun was quickly making its way downwards to meet the earth again, casting fleeting shadows back through the trees.  Then in front of him the treeline cleared and he saw the city.  It had grown much since he had left.  The wooden huts had expanded out into stone dwellings, chimneys sighing out smoke from warm fires.  Two stone walls rose up in front of him, one on the town perimeter to keep out the wolves that roamed the land, and the other stretching up to surround the hill in the town's center.  The gate stood open, a guard resting inside next to a fire at the watch-house barely gave him a glance.  He had dressed in the village custom, which at least hadn't changed much in the interim it seemed.

Carolus knew he would need to find an inn soon, but the hill drew him in first.  The town itself lost its nostalgia in the cobbled streets and stone houses that now stood in defiance of the past, but the hill would always be the hill.  The wall around it was not the barricade of the past, but a building's fortification, though this gate too swung open in the chill wind.

Despite the warm feathered cloak, he shivered.  It was as it had been, but for the well.  Some Mason had made steps to spiral down into the depths, a fact that would have scared the elders back to life if they could know.  Stepping up to the edge, Carolus looked down deep into the darkness, trying to see the demons of the past that had frightened him in his youth. More wind, whipping around on this the highest part of the city, wrenching loose a feather from his cloak, then fleeing down the hole with its prize.  The white shape fell downward, sucked in by the earth, and in that darkness something darker moved away, taking with it a small bit of the sky-world.

A Finch on the Rooftop

It was the third week of winter that I met Finch.  It was free period, so as usual everyone but the bookworms or the outcasts were out in the courtyard.  Me and a few others were playing with a ball.  No real game, just tossing it around.  Jimmy, me, Francis, Leo, and Tools.  Tools was the only one with a nickname by that point; we still called Leo Ed back then.

So anyway, Jimmy all started riling me up, same way he always does, but back then we all had thinner skin, didn't know he just liked seeing us all squirm.  So I threw that ball real hard at him.  First time I'd actually wanted to bean a kid in the face with something.  I was only 8, an only child, and we'd had a pretty dull first year at the academy.

Trouble is, I missed.  and then, after all that windup, that little kiddy rage, I missed spectacularly.  Ball went way clear of him, hit a rock, bounced off a tree, hit the courtyard wall, the brick, not a window, we didn't break any of those until at least spring, and then managed to go rocketing off onto the roof.

That was five stories up, and that wasn't a light ball.  First time I actually showed promise at graduating as a mage instead of a husk.  Some kids didn't do that much in their whole ten years, but all the mages managed something like it in the first two, generally.  Nobody believes the fairy tale of the ninth year master mage.  Well, maybe some of the kids who turn into husks, but that's more out of desperation.  Anyway, I was about third in our year, so it wasn't the most talked about display, but it put me up there.  Not until a few kids actually put together what happened beyond that I had just lost our ball onto the roof.

I didn't mind being ganged up on by the other guys and told to go get the thing; I was still fuming.  So I walked up, had to take the long way up the stairs because the classroom floor was off limits that day.  And I ended up on the entire other side of the school when I got there.  Back then we hadn't familiarized ourselves with the academy enough to know all the shortcuts up, and I took the opening to the roof that was almost the farthest from where I needed to be.

I was up above the dormitory and the ball was supposed to be over back towards the upper-class practice rooms.  Must have been a mile to go around the whole thing.  And it wasn't like the roof was just flat or anything.  It dipped and peaked and had skylights and statues and who knows what else.  I never explored the whole place in my years there, mostly because it kept changing.  And that day it was just a tad snowy too.  Just warm enough to make it go slushy, but cloudy enough that it was still actually there and not dried up.  So I was taking it slow, at that point I was on all fours trying to get up a particularly slippery and steep part when I see Finch walking along, tossing the ball up and down and humming.

I didn't know it was Finch at that point, though, obviously.  I just saw some person wrapped up in cloaks with a mask on, mostly all of it was black, with my ball.  So like any eight year old I asked him to give it back.  Not the most politely though, I was still a bit mad despite the walk.  He just stopped cocked his head to the side and stared out at me, glass filled eye-slits giving away nothing of his face.  Next thing I said, because I still wasn't that smart, was what was he doing up here, this was free period.  He was the same height as me, so it was obvious he was someone from the lower grades.  He didn't respond to that one either though, just cocked his head in the other direction.  Anyway, at that point I got to what should have been my first question, namely, who are you and why are you dressed funny like that.

So he says back in his pretty high voice for a boy "My name is Tavius Lucile, but you may call me Finch."  And then he paused.  Took a second before I realized I was supposed to answer with my own.  I was and am prone to rudeness, though at that time it was mostly out of ignorance.  Anyway, he sits down, still tossing the ball up and down and motions me to sit as well.  "As to the second question, why are you dressed so normally?  This is a place for the top possibly gifted students in the whole kingdom, plus some of the outer islands, and you just casually wander around in that?"

There I am a kid confronted with such an enigma and all I could say was "but this is normal," like it made sense that way.  "Yes, that's what I said."  Then he tossed me the ball.  I only mostly tripped entirely when catching it, looking up in time to see him strolling off into the distance, waving without looking back.  "Next time don't try using magic to throw things when you're angry."  None of the rest of them believed me at dinner.