Grab the Fire, Ride the Wind, Eat the Lightning, Speak the Thunder.

Grab the fire, huh?  They make it sound so easy.  They say it like the thousand year old ritual it is, like the creaking, old bones that stood here before me.  It's not a torch to be grabbed by the handle, it's not some metaphorical flame, it's a naked flame flickering in the soot-stained brazier that sits atop this high mountain.  I can see the scars on their hands, aged burns, some more so than others as they stand on the other side of the light.  Their white robes plastered against the darkness and the cloudy sky.  I step up, trying not to look at their hands, their faces.  The shivering goes away, the wind slicing through me no match for the furnace before me.  Inside it, the deep orange slithers over the blackened logs which burn into little flecks of white caught in the updraft to sail up into the night.  The fire is not special, no strange, magical wood, just some pieces brought up from the kitchens down below.  The brazier is only special in its ancient nature, just iron bent and smelted into a rough bowl on thick, tripod legs.  I'm certainly not special, not fire resistance here.  Just a cup of tea, drugged a bit to dull the pain that will come.  I've been waiting for a while, but the elders don't show impatience.  They don't turn when the thunder echos down in the valley.  I'd rather get it over with before the storm moves up this way though.  A little fire is initiation but a lightning bolt is death.  Plus, the tea is going to wear off soon.  Down into the light I plunge my hand, grabbing and finding nothing.  This is, of course, the expected result.  I have to wait for it to catch.  It's hot, but it feels like there's a layer of something in between me and the fire.  The older monks say that's what the tea does.  A little tongue flicks its way into the cylinder of my hand.  I don't think, just grip down.  It feels cold, so hot that I feel the chill move up my arm as I yank it out, falling over.  My arm aches, and I see the flicker of flame on it out of the corner of my eye.  Above is just the dark clouds, an occasional flicker of light in them arcing from one high grey blob to another.  The bucket.  If I let it burn too far my arm won't fit in the bucket.  I can't see it right away as I pull myself up, scanning the ground to my left where it should be.  A hand on my shoulder, one of the elders holding it out for me.  Thunder.  Lightning.  It comes like a snake out of the cloud, and I can see it dart out at me.  White with little hints of blue to highlight teeth and eyes as it steams forward.  Maybe the tea is still working, because I don't try to dodge, can't dodge in time.  My mouth is the only thing to move, dropping open to scream, to shout a warning, to question my teachings.  I don't know, I just faint.

Its damp, lying here on the stones.  It must be a low patch because it puddles up around me.  The rain is still falling, causing my eyelids to jump every time they get hit.  I'm still outside, still lying in the rain.  Each strand of muscle feels stretched to its limit, strained and bruised.  I can't open my eyes to see, won't, really.  I don't want to see.  I should be inside, bandaged and resting, so something is wrong.  I didn't put the arm out, I let it burn on.  The lighting stopped that somehow.  A groan.  Somebody is still here.  I have to open my eyes, have to sit up.  I'm heavy, like a drenched log, and my body protests the effort.  It doesn't get to make up my mind though.  I'm upright, and now the eyes can open, free of the downpour.  Ahead of me lays Elder Marin.  He also is struggling upright, if a bit faster than I did.  I want to say something, but I can't hear my voice or it won't come out.  I can hear the rain though.  He was always so unflappable, and now his mouth is open, starting.  Past me?  I spend the effort to turn, but just more storm clouds sit over mountaintops that way.  Then I look down.  My hand is still shut into a fist and I see a speck of orange beneath the scarred fingers.  I relax it open, or try to.  I have to bring my other arm open to pry a finger up.  A spark, and a catching one flares out, settling back on my hand despite the rain.  It's warm in the cold dampness, sputtering angrily against the rain before catching into a conflagration that envelops my arm, scars and all.  I hear Elder Marin start mumbling a mantra, but I don't look up, can't look up.  The flames entrance me.  Beneath them I see my skin blacken more, going from the reddish crispy part it was before to a dark obsidian.  The flame draws into itself, burning hotter and the black flecks off into grey, then white ash.  The flame disappears entirely, red veins of heat in the flaky white skin.  The tea must still be working, because I can't feel a thing.  Maybe they mixed in some hallucinogenic stuff with the pain dulling herbs.  Then it goes out entirely, rain washing at the ash, running it off my arm in rivulets.  My whole arm.  My unscarred arm.  Then the pain hits, aches all over again I'd forgotten I had.  When they come to drag me back down to the infirmary, drag all of us down there, I can barely register things.  I might have fainted again.  Brother Milo is a liar, this was much more nerve wracking than the spring resplendent ceremony.

Underneath

Wrecked and broken, whole and sturdy, fear and fearing all go down, down into the hole of a city.  Spiraling round like gutters on the pit walls the roads empty their people in.  None leave, not by that route.  It is somewhat of a pilgrimage for them, soaked in religious fervor mixed with pragmatism.  What little shade and water that hides itself down in the depths draws them in, flowing like water down deep to soak into the tunnels, caves, and cavernous buildings that make it up.  We all abandoned the dying surface, that or died on it, parched in the sun.  What's left of us is darkened, even the hopeful casting their eyes downward, away from the light.  I blend into the crowd, blackish cloak with a thick hood, nothing showing from underneath it.  Anonymity for each man woman or child, though nobody seems to care either way.  Some people take quick glances up, burning the surface into their eyes, a moment of pain to remember humanities moment of pain.  It's a passing thing.  Most are lost in thought of what happens next.  What is life like down there, how do I survive, who can I trust, how did it all happen.  Pointless, most of it.  Life just happens, dwelling over it before you even know anything just muddles the mind.  How it happened is worth something.  It won't help now, not for a few generations.  Think on it enough and it will leave a mark, imprint something in us that might be a little respect.  Some of that down the line will help.  Might not take the ground beneath our feet if we have it, might not end a way of life same as how the sky above our head came crashing down.  Still, we exist, we trickle down into our hastily dug holes to hide.  Hundreds of thousands of them scattered all across the globe.  Plans are to connect them all, form a network between them.  Some of them might, most will have to fall down into chaos before they get up as a society again, if they get up again.  This city might make it, should make it.  I knew these people once, and they were strong, they were brave, they were honest.  Some broke under the sun, withered and shriveled into monstrous shapes, but under the black cloaks there are strong men and women.

Day doesn't fit anymore, even with the lights.  There are periods to sleep and periods to work, periods to play and to congregate, but it is not a day.  A night, perhaps, but everything is night, pillars of scattered through the city like stars, a great round chamber in the center shining like an inside-out moon.  We live in seasons now, life progressing for the person despite being crammed in with so many others once the ceiling was closed off.  We are shut in, closed to the sky, and to each other.  The moon-chamber is our openness.  Our center, our light is always alive with the singing and dancing.  It is sad, it is happy, it is brash and shy.  Ecstatic, somber, ritualistic and brave.  There we share ourselves and our emotions, the tender smiles and the flares of anger.  When we spend ourselves there, enervated with our souls bleeding out, we flow back out into the canvas of the night, to the silence.  The moon our heartbeat and the stars our work, sleep, and thoughts.  All that is left of our sky is the food and our clothes.  The sweet tastes of sun and clouds, grass and rain.  Some of that is in it, vitamins that we produce and mix in, chemicals that flavor it like what we used to eat.  Of our dress, it is of the beaches.  Little bits of color tied and draped on around us in certain key places.  The heat forced us to it, and the fashion of it charmed us.  As we work, tunneling, laboring away in it the fat melts away and the muscle stays.  We walk leaving a trail of it in our sweat.  Even the long days of working the machinery or calculating out rations is bathed in the sweat and movement of life.  We are industrious in this, working like ants in a hive.  When a lack is felt somewhere, a man might step in to fill the position; where we fall short, a woman pushes through our lack.  We live here now, these past ten years are the awakenings of a seed that was planted in the midst of hopeless winter, sprouting in the spring of our new way of life.

Where there is darkness comes tragedy.  We put up lights and it seeps in, hearts and rooms alike filled with shadows.  For twenty-five years, the earth was still.  Small shifts as we settled into her, digging our tendrils into clay-flesh and rocky-bone.  She moved this sleep-cycle, cracking apart and flattening in a swathe.  Just pockets left glimmers of light that I cling to.  I push back, forcing my way towards sounds, other shifts in the rock like my own drill.  Where we had once felt proud in our precise cuts, measured calmly and with deliberation, I stab out again and again, moving with instinct.  Loose stone grinds above, reminding me of my folly.  I must check the panic, harness the fear.  Drive and not be driven.  Breathing lets the explosion that builds within settle.  With a care, a thought to our ways before I head out for the moon-chamber.  A great crack runs through it, the center half buried in grey-brown mess.  There are dead all around, many more than passed in the whole of our time here.  We had grown, expanded, and prospered in our fall.  I see others, recognize the dread, the looks from twenty-eight years ago when the sky began to fall, from twenty-five when we assembled that first day in the moon-chamber.  We forgot that lesson, perhaps.  We feel it again, and curse ourselves for it.  

We few reach out to the rest of the city, stretch our power to regain what we had.  Enough to live.  In the tunnels we find the dead.  I know them, the blank faces.  Excavating more room in the graveyard takes as much time as finding them.  It had been left untouched somehow, the peace of the past dead at least left undisturbed.  These are still the strong men and women that walked down here, but we stand hunched and worn down.  With us all the moon-chamber is still left with room for more and more.  The great crack is still there, cracked around us, into us, and between us.  In the large emptiness we create sparks, words like rocks smashing against each other to argue our path.  Some leave, tunneling off into the darkness even beyond the flickering stars of our home.  Most of us stay to rebuild.  We have known other ways, the sun and the sky, and we could change again, but running away just reminds us of what we lost.

A monument of sorts has been erected into the moon-chamber.  The names of the lost, dead and departed, we carved them into the cracks, the opened fissures that run through the dome and the sloped floor.  It seems short of what we should do, but it gives us some peace.  In the months past the collapse, we have been quieter.  Loneliness is less present, most travelling in groups, coming together for the presence of others to lessen the emptiness of the halls.  Then and in the moon-chamber we speak less, sing less, dance less.  Noise will spring up, continue on, and then die with a glance at a remembered name or the slope of a wall that reminds us.  Sometimes it just takes the echo of space to give us pause.  I see the wound as much in the stone as in the hearts.  We heal slowly, and our scars remain.

The face is done, one of them.  They are to be sisters, both scarred and weathered.  A stone pillar I found holding up the center of an unused chamber.  It was once a church, I think.  The earth comes first, as she is the older.  Her face is soft in the hard stone, a smile for her sister wrapped within her arms.  As mankind's features emerge, cycle after cycle into the carving,  I am driven to longer hours.  Her face upturned towards earth's, a wonder in her smooth eyes.  Every so often somebody passes by, drawn by the sound of stonework.  I am not done, I have no time to see them, to look to the door.  I eat quickly, sleep what hours I can in the room, and build up a stench of sweat.  Perhaps it drives away some of the visitors, I am not sure, they never say anything.

Toes complete, and now the base, thirty feet in circumference.  I have reached the place where some inscription must go, yet nothing appears to me.  Each fold of their short dresses, each scar scattered across their bodies cried out to me its shape and form, but this blank loop whispers only of its emptiness, its unfinished blankness.  I sleep, bathe, eat, each time returning to an enigma of my own creation.  It is not done, I cannot move on.  Some days I sit and stare at it, circling it in impatience before sitting again, back against the door-frame.  Other days I wander in the tunnels, reinforced now against a quake of greater magnitude than our collapse.  I have cut myself off from the rest, and I begin to feel it.  Even when I step inside the moon-chamber I stay at the wall, staring out into the people.  I wait, for what, I don't know anymore.

Night gives way to day as day moves ever onward towards the night.  This is what it shall say.  I looked down at the white emptiness for so long I had begin to forget up existed.  Above us there is a sky, past the deep layers of stone there pounds down sun's rays, harsh and blinding.  I looked up, finally.  Water dripping on my nose did it, reminded me of the rain.  I want to see it again, long to in this long night.  So much of it all I have forgotten in the name of remembrance.  Where there are grave lessons of the past, tragedy and pain there were also happy things.  We have forgotten that, somewhat.  It seems to me that it is part of our humanity to forget.  This is why the stone, the earth, is our other half.  Carve out our memories in stone and they last where in flesh they soon disappear.  One day, when I'm old, I will go back to the surface, see the sun with my dying breath.  Now I live in the night, carving out our history for the ones who follow.  First of many, the sisters were the easiest to put into concept, far harder tasks of folly or vivacity will follow.  When I pass them, glancing in, there is often light, one or two figures staring up at the faces or down at the letters.  Perhaps they will gain something from it as I have.

Guiding Spirit

Light seeped in under, tickling eyes that his hat brim had failed to protect.  Up the hand to pull down the shade.  The man wasn't ready for the day yet.  It wasn't the fierce growl of a hangover that moved the hand, he didn't get those, it was the sizzling activity the sun brought.  Come dawn the people of the town were up, brave enough in the day to leave their wooden shells to explore the dusty plain that town was situated on.  They'd find the corpses.  Twisted things that may have been as much man as they were beast once the light got to them.  Birds picking at the entry holes for his bullets wouldn't help the shape much either.  They would see it all.  Not understanding any of it they would see it and they would fear.  They would fear the things that went bump in the dark and hide away in their shabby fortresses, but they knew that fear.  If the things in the dark were gone, a new fear would take its place somehow, and he wasn't in the habit of sticking around to become a target.  Still, the old one had been there again, and that powerful a spirit took something out of you a drink only massaged away for so long.  He felt it leaving him, that asuredness that he could keep going against any foe, evaporating in the morning sun.  He needed a rest, and he feared one in equal measure.  When they were done with the pre-possessed corpses they would find him, the barkeep first when he heard which way the man had left in the night.  It hadn't been a long walk away, a few blocks down and then into a side street, an alley, if something so small could really be called one.  It was some effort to brace himself to a wall and slide up to standing, took the man a while of real concentration to get it right.  Figured he would wander off toward the next place he felt callin' him, the next destination that thing men called a soul propelled him toward.  Least, any of the ones he had asked had called it that.  Soul was a tricky idea to get a grasp on.  He only knew if he kept walking the way he felt was best he'd get to the next bar or the next abandoned mine, or the next stone cathedral.  The cathedrals were nice, they let him stay and rest a while, didn't ask many questions before he headed off to the next place.  Just kinda kicked the dirt to see where it would go, feelin' about in the mind.  Towards the sunset as usual.  Always a westward trek these days.  Got to cross the main street though.  Draw as little attention as possible with his head down.  The rifle might have drawn some attention, but without the moonlight it lost its shine, more iron in the grip with yellowed ivory inset.  Not a looker.  Barkeep lookin' down the main way saw him go through, one of his best customers in years.  Wasn't sad to see him go though, he had a nose for things and he could smell trouble like a cloud from all the way down the street.  Wasn't there last night but now it sat like an aura around him.  Somethin' would be happening, and it was happening in the west.

West Don't Mean a Thing

The band lost its heart by his third drink, a strong shot of something fancy, yet powerful.  He wouldn't remember the name afterwards.  It was hard to play for a one man audience that spent most of his time looking the opposite direction.  When they stopped at the end of one piece and didn't start up, he didn't seem to register the loss and so they packed up and headed out into the night with their cased instruments.  He got his fifth shot.  The bartender figured for a lonely night earlier, let the band leave on account of that, and had a hard time figuring out what to do with the man in the dark, almost black it was so dark, green overcoat.  Lizard hide it looked, the way that it had bumps all over and ridges at the collar.  Man didn't talk, just dug into his pockets and flicked another few coins onto the bar.  He hadn't even said a word when he came in, just pointed at a bottle back behind the bar and dropped some money down.  His lips were like old monks to speech, and like them they seemed to hold their alcohol well.  Clock in the corner wound itself around 'till it hit three am.  Bartender would shut down earlier, but the man kept the money flowing and he had needed an excuse to stay up and clean out some of the gunk that accumulated on the floor behind the bar.  Three o'clock though and the man stands up, click of his boots match the tick and he leaves a few more coins on the bar.  Leaves through the saloon-style doors.  It's a bright night out, moons both shining out and the stars in compliment.  Bright enough to have real shadows.  Shadows some men hide in.  Despite the drinks his hands find the holsters easily, practiced.  Draw like a spark and the aiming happens half-way through the trigger pull.  Other man's out before he saw the motion, before his carefully aimed rifle could fire off.  Night like this you forget the sound of gunfire, it gets drowned out in the silence.  Minute later and you doubt you heard anything at all.  Next morning the crows will find him though.  Walking down the streets, the other few filled shadows empty out their occupants, slumping over in mid-shot as he walks.  Some near the end just slink off deeper before he comes.  Too many to forget now, the scent of the powder mixing in a trail that leads back to the bar's steps.  Maybe people are awake, bartender still is, but they don't appear from inside the wooden shacks.  Other end of the village a man sits in the moonlight.  No hat on, silvery hair bright in the moonlight and a gun across his lap.  Stops a good twenty yards back from him.  Looks deep in that direction, seeing more of the gun than the man.  Inlaid silver handle, ivory carved out in the shape of a wolf and carefully tapped into place.  A long steel barrel with a polished shine to it.  Man nods in recognition of it, looks up after a while.  Chair man is just grinning.  Doesn't seem to perturbed.  Man's shadow creeps closer to the chair as the moons set behind him.  Touches the leg and he draws.  Fast, like he means it.  Eyes hard and clear.  Other man disappears, clack of the gun into the chair.  Man walks up and holsters his pistol.  Gingerly grabs the gun where it lies.  Other man watches, leaning up against the wall of a nearby house.  Fades out to leave the man with his old rifle, goin' to exist himself elsewhere for a while.  He'll be back, never does leave the man for long, always shows up after a night like this.  Lone man in the street turns around and walks back to the bar.  Bartender's just about to go to bed, putting away the mop and the bucket right then.  Can smell the burnt gunpowder and registers the rifle slung over the man's shoulder.

"Sir, I'ma need that last drink if you don't mind.  On a night like this one, spirits are genuine powerful in a man."

Bowels of the City

Can't shut off the tunnels to work on them.  City wouldn't stay up if they got shut off, and we can only put her down every few years.  Too risky to do it more than that.  So I'm there, in the tunnels, wind whipping past me stuck onto the ceramic siding with a piton, fixing the cracked tiles and re-etching the runes into the clay.  The chisel chained to my wrist hanging loose right now.  Can't go in here with magical auras up or they'd gunk up the system.  Can't go in here with anything loose or you'd gunk up the system.  More than it already is, mind.  gotta keep an eye out when you're working.  Can't hear anything besides the woosh, and maybe a buzz if you're in the right spot.  Gotta look upwind and hope you see something before it hits you.  Only really works for the big stuff though.  If you can see it early enough to get out of the way, not getting out of the way tends to cause severe injury.  Saw a guy last week who got hit by a flock of birds that got in, ripped to shreds by all the beaks and talons that went by.  Small stuff is harder to deal with.  Gotta wear protection and hope it doesn't let anything through.  Non-magical though, auras, remember?  Can't outfit every worker with mithril armor, so most of us have steel and iron, but not too muck or the weight cracks the tiles.  Anyway, I'm making my way from the service entrance over to a bad spot, musta got hit with something really big to have taken out so many tiles.  Gotta actually bring in some more tiles and fix 'em onto the walls.  Mean's more weight so less armor.  I've got the bag on my front like a chestplate, hope it slows down anything that hits there and doesn't break the tiles too much.  Take a look upstream and I see this bright red trail come round the bend about half a mile up.  Could be blood or it could be wine, both, neither, a long banner caught and threaded its way into the tunnels.  I don't know what, so I start back tracking towards the entrance.  I was a ways off though, so by the time I'm halfway there this stuff hits me square in the face.  It's liquid, that's for sure, but it a'int anything I'm familiar with.  Then I feel the magic in it.  It's a honest to goodness gigantic batch of potion that made its way down here.  Some kook must have poured it off the edge to get rid of it.  I got no idea what this stuff does, but its started working, and that's a bad sign.  This stuff is gonna gunk up the tunnels real good, but more importantly, I may or may not kill me first.  I can turn my head and get a look at it as it flows on past and rounds another bend.  Hope some other guys are luckier than I am in avoiding it.  Gonna have to get a filtration crew in here.  Then I'm slipping.  Look down and see the stuff is eating through my rope.  Doesn't feel like it's doing anything like that to my face, but on the rope it's chewing through it like acid.  Weightless isn't the way to describe it.  It's more like you can feel yourself falling sideways.  Wind just picks you up and throws your body down the tube.  Only way I can get a hold of something is with a lot of luck.  Tiles scatter down-wind of my, falling out of the bag.  I'm going fast, but I know where I'm headed.  There's a gap up here soon.  Intake output for the sky.  It's about a mile down, so I've gotta get luck on my side.  I've got the mithril gauntlets for it, habit of mine, but I'm not near any pitons.  When I do get near this one is broke off, musta got smashed off sometime since last week.  I remember replacing it.  Time's not on my side and I go hurtling out the side, can't get all the way across the gap, tips of my gauntlet bounce off the other side and I'm falling, down this time, and it really does feel weightless now.  Get a good look at the city as I go, white towers stretching upwards toward the sun.  It shrinks slowly, bit by bit until it's the size of pea.  Then I'm going through a cloud.  I'm not gonna turn around, don't wanna know what I'm gonna hit when I hit ground.  Don't know what we're over today, I never really check.  It feels like forever, and then it's water.  Cold, hard against my back as it seeps in through my back-armor.  I'm alive so far, but I don't know how long.  The ground is a tough place, from all I've heard, and I'm sinking.

To Step

The blood rained around him to match the rain, staying on the sword a moment before sliding off with the weather.  To watch him was to see death as incidental to his dance, the sharp footwork married with the graceful swaying of his torso.  All of it was centered around the sword, his partner who never left his hand as he whirled her around the clearing.  Even as the bodies built up he found his way around on the damp ground.  He had proposed the dance and his sword had accepted, following his lead from one move to the next.  After it was over the percussion wouldn't stop, pounding as it did into the red puddles that grouped under silvery chainmail and laquered leather.  A final move and she was sheathed.  He may have chosen the way of the sword, but the sword had just as much part in accepting him.  Letting him possess her.

He was tall, gaunt even, with black, shoulder-length hair and a bored expression that warmed to almost a smile when he danced.  She was long and thin, bright and shining, keen despite much use.  He wore her on his him in a brown leather scabbard that hid out of view under his thick white cloak.  As they walked away those few witnesses from the treeline couldn't see a spot of red on the cloak, on any of him.

It was still in the clearing.  Clean of life, clean of sound, clean of movement.  Dirty though.  To walk through it looking at the bodies or rooting around in pockets or pry wet steel from dead hands left red and brown stains everywhere, blood and dirt and bloody dirt mixing in the rainwater in a sickening paint that stuck to everything.  It would sell for a good profit, the low-people would thank the dancer for that.  

He would face worse, and they would be there too, waiting and watching.  These were a few tempermental guardsmen who took none too kindly to his words over drinks.  They had brothers, uncles, fathers, and sons.  They had friends and lovers and employers.  There would be more to take their place, but the memories wouldn't rest until the dancer rested with a stone above his head.  No stone if some had their way.  The dozen that lay in the clearing would be doubled the next time.  If a time after, there would be double that.  The low-people would see the eventuality.  Even if the dancer never missed a step of the dance, a poisoned cup or a swift knife at midnight would find him where a flashing blade would not.

He never was seen after that cloudy night, no pure white cloak walking through the city in the rain.  It could have been any end to him, they supposed.  Someone might know, would have to know, but it didn't do anyone any good to make sure of it, so they didn't.  A few thought that he might have been wise enough to just leave, but either fear of being wrong or prudence of their own made them keep it as their own drunken rumor.

It didn't take long for the story to pass into the city mythos, latching onto the storytellers and filling out into a fanciful pattern.  Each old man or wagging tongue that sat near a barroom fire took to calling any young man in a cloak a dancer, and the chunkier ones were called clumsy dancers.  The average folk started watching and waiting, not actively, but keeping an eye out.  When the sky starts its music some yearn to see a dance, hope that the skulking patron in the shadowy corner is the dancer, returned to his stage.  There hasn't been a true dance in the city in decades, but they hope.

Wet Nose

It was a condition, and not a good one.  Maybe more, maybe less.  Not sure yet, but it sure isn't normal.  Mighta been a bad idea to trust the drink, not in that bar.  Heard the guy who used to run it wasn't from 'round these here parts.  Came from up north, but not so far as Canada.  Michigan or somethin'.  Anyway, he was one of those lab types.  Even wore his lab coat at the bar, servin' up the drinks.  Shoulda been a tip off, but his place was cheap.  Didn't taste bad, most days, and it got you drunk, most days.  He'd always scribble somethin' down, made us up tabs.  Wouldn't serve some stuff to some people depending on the day.  He was quirky.  Nice though, at least he smiled a lot.  Anyway, me and the boys, you know the boys, we headed there one night.  It was hot, we just got done with work and the weekend called us.  Wasn't like we were gonna get back until bars closed, and if we could help it we'd buy up some beers for the road and drink out in the desert.  That was the plan.  Got me one of the new brews on tap.  It was rich, almost black it was so brown and it went down thick and heavy.  Knocked one back and went for another, made me wait a while 'fore he gave it to me, but that wasn't out of the normal.  Anyway, I start in on the second and when I'm draining it I get a nosebleed.  Don't wanna get blood on my clothes, stuff stains and I was in a white shirt.  PLus the thing was just draining out of me.  Barman, I told you he was called old man Ellis to us folks, no?  Okay, so Ellis gets a look on his face, never seen it quite before but I pegged it somewhere between surprise, worry and glee.  Was just a moment.  I went on over to the bathroom, gotta wash it all off my nose and my hands before I plugged up the part with some paper towels.  Might not be the manliest way, but it gets the job done.  I get in front of the mirror and that's when it got all weird.  My nose was blackening up.  Like it was gettin' a sunburn real quick, but darker and blacker.  Then it goes and starts growing fur.  I seen werewolf movies and this was about what was going on.  Juttin' out more and gettin' wet.  Then it goes and stops, like easin' on the breaks for a truck comin' up to a stop sign.  Just my nose.  I went and checked my teeth and me ears and didn't feel no furry tail, but I got a dog nose.  I let out a scream, explative like.  I'd been in there for a bit.  One of the boys comes in after me, makin' sure I'm okay or something and he says something like "oh fuck what's that you got there randy?"  It ain't halloween and I'm not known for jokes, but I think that's what he thought at first, never really found out.  Anyway, old man Ellis comes up behind him and he just jabs a needle into his arm.  Ben, guy who came in just collapses.  "What the fuck did you just do, Ellis?" I say.  He gives me a look and looks all disappointed.  Says "It didn't work quite right after all."  I wanna know what he did, if it was the alcohol, which he says yes it was and that he'll tell me if I just come with him for a bit.  Opens up one of the stalls and twists some levers and its like james bond a big stairwell comes poppin out of the wall.  Into the wall, really, makes more sense why we always thought the building was too long from the outside.  Down we go and the thing closes behind us.  It's dark but Ellis got himself a lighter out and when we get to the bottom he flicks on a switch.  Thought he had a brewery down here but it looks all futuristic, tubes and liquids and some bubblin', some got frost on the outside.  One of the things looks like a big vat of blood that's filtering its way down into one of the tanks.  I'm all "What the hell ~is~ this"  He don't answer, just starts fiddling around with some of the knobs.  Pours some of the liquids together and runs them under a torch.  My nose itches.  After a minute, he walks over with a cup.  Smells nasty, bright pink with little flecks of green floating around in it.  Eliis says "drink it."  I say "why?"  He says "You would like your nose back, right?"  I nod.  He says "drink it."  I do.  Tastes as bad as it smells, the little flecks catching for a moment in my throat.  I can feel the change.  Just like last time with the nose bleed.  I feel the stretching and compression this time, more than I did before.  Feels like a whole bunch of stuff gets pushed up under my skin.  Take a look at my reflection in a glass and I look fine.  Ellis says it's temporary.  Says it in lots of big words, has to backtrack a bunch to get the point across.  Gotta get a drink every day now, while he's workin' on fixin' it.  Says he wanted something different, something more controllable.  Says if he gets it right I won't need any of his liquids to flip my nose around.  Says it's hard and that it's gonna take time.  Tells me to come back next time it changes, should be tomorrow he says.  More big words.  He's talking science now.  Failed science in the seventh grade, so I got no clue how it works.  Seems like some sort of magic to me.  Still, I get free drinks now, on top of the nasty smelling ones to keep the nose in.

Bureaucratic Fussing

“You ran.” She eyed the white tile across to the other side of the room as she talked. “Why?”

“He was bundled up in a fuzzy bath towel, still dripping into it as he glared up at her. “You know. Fuck it, you know why I ran.” His teeth showed, a snarl pushing past his lips. She didn't seem to notice.

“Please state for the record why you ran, Mr. Williams.” Down flicked her eyes to the clipboard, pen poised above a blank white response-box. “This is crucial to the debriefing process.”

He turned his face away, off to a white wall before he answered. “Damn you all. You know it was because of the fire. It was your fire and it messed up the whole operation. I lost a friend in there.”

Her pen moved quickly, jotting down at most half of his words. “May I remind you, Mr. Williams, that Associates do not have friends while serving?”

“No you bloody well can't.” The wall played out a sequence of mental images for him. A toy rabbit there, a red pool soaking into the snow, a thin streak of smoke floating up above the treeline.

She waited calmly.

Breaking back out of it he stared at her light blue eyes. “You lab-types don't know the field, and you'd better not stick your nose in again.”

A sideways glance at his face, redder than it had been when they had started, thicker looking too as if the blood had inflated his thin face like a balloon. “The information section of the Agency is tasked with monitoring and effecting positive change in the missions performed by the field section, along with the task of debriefing the returning Associates.”

Breathe in, breathe out. “You had no cause to light him up.”

More quick jots then a pause. “You refer to Associate Ward, Mr. Williams?”

“No.” His gaze had drifted down to the tabletop, his hands grasping at intangibles. “He was dead, gone. You did what you had to.”

“There were no other Associates assigned to that sector, and no other incendiary surges authorized.” She flipped up some of the stack of papers on the clipboard before setting it on the table in front of him. “Which incident of the incendiary surge protocol are you referring to?

It was a list of the past month, each of the five entries exhaustively detailed. Time, place, context, Variables. The code names of all the supervising personnel. Aftereffects from public witnesses. “It's not listed.”

“Impossible.” She didn't blink.

He noticed. “No, improbable or uncanny. I saw it with my own eyes. Agent Wisconson was sitting drinking tea before he just flamed up.”

She retrieved her clipboard and began writing again. “Elaborate, please, Mr. Williams.”

“We were at a catch point. Subtle op., casual gear and a clean toolkit. I had a knife, fit in well with the local custom. Wisconson had a concealed knife in his boot, but regular issue so it would have stood out on his belt too much. Locals don't get a hold of vibro-knives much and live through flaunting 'em, ';east not ones who would go to that bar. I say this because even if we were caught with what we had, we were traceless. Wisconson was not in any danger of capture, alive or dead, and then he bursts into flame just like that.” Some page flipping, more writing. “Not easy to keep cool and play it off as a fluke after that. They a'int stupid so they figured the pair was there, I was there, and so the close down the bar and barricade it shut. Target wasn't there yet. Room sweep starts, and I'm clean, like I say, so I make it through. Lose the knife though.” His eyes drift off to the side, living the day in cinema on the white-tile wall.

She coughs, softly. “Mr. Williams”

“What?”

“Associate Wisconson is currently stationed in the tropical branch on sick leave. Files came in last week.” She turned the clipboard and pointed at the signature and fingerprint stamp. “After the clning incident and the teleporter catastrophe, such happening should not exist currently.”

“Well, I saw him there, and I talked to him. It was him through and through. Scanners checked him out.” He was frowning, forehead furrowing to match. “There is no possible time-frame he could have gotten through?”

Tapping the paper with the pen she bit her lip. “The request for leave came in after your reported date of death.”

“You checked with medical and the other experimental solutions groups about this?”

She was back to staring at the white wall past his head. “As is part of procedure.”

“Damn.” He spit the word, short, punctual, and wet.

“Perhaps we are getting off topic.” A neck twitch that resisted the urge to glance at him.

“Right, can't have an incomplete story,” he rolled his eyes, “Now can we? So I was disarmed and in a tight spot. They could find me out if they deep-probed the room, and it was getting near to that. Just saw another guy get flamed, so that was on my mind. I was lookin' mighty spooked, and they musta noticed. Big guy, leader of 'em, large and burly and bald comes up and he starts glaring at me. Tells me to open up so he can get a probe down in my gullet. A'ight gonna happen, so I make a break for it. Cover's blown by then, no time to get back under their noses and make it back in time to intercept the target. I could take these guys out easy, but not fast enough to stop any alarm. I run.”

“Concluding with your pickup in the tundra three days later, where you were cooking a reindeer for food?” There was some judgment in that line, and he could swear he saw a glance.

“Yes.”

“No more details to add?”

“Nothing that's not in my writeup already.”

“Thank you or the time.” She knew it was obligatory, he knew it was, and they both knew the other did too.

He still felt compelled. “You're welcome.”

She smiled, dry and deep. “We will be in touch, Mr. Williams. You have banked vacation leave, we suggest you take it.”

Pinprick thoughts.

Color it any shade, it stands in silhouette an absence of space.  A monolith that stretches up to the sky and back, winding stairways hugging tight and twisted 'round the frame.  All metal too, dull and painted over so the sunshine won't scatter and reflect, but it still gets burning hot come noon.  This year it is red.  The city thought it would be nice to have it red, so they paid to have it re-painted.  Last year it was blue, blending in more with the sky that backdrops it from any angle you look at it from.  Always looking up at it, the towering sight of it that pulls the head back until a beam of sun squints your eye and turns your head away.  Nobody ever talks of taking it down, though the notion has to be in there somewhere.  It takes up the hill, the prime hill for basking in the sun or standing in the breeze, but everyone moves around it.  Nobody takes the trip up it in the mornings, before it melts plastic and leather and chips the paint with the expanding metal.  Nobody gets the view of the ground full of people staring up at it, up towards it is more correct.  You stop seeing it, that tower, after a while and start seeing the sky.  A big blue expanse, sometimes cloudy, sometimes windy, with a large negative space in the center of it.  I realized this after a gallery put up some art that was just the silhouette, the tower left a blank white while the rest was filled in with almost photographic detail in paints.  The clouds were a bit wrong.  I looked at it like that too, looked past it like that.  Next year it might be blue again, or green.  The paint chips away quickly.  It can't be left unpainted though, offices start noticing it then, saying that it throws off too much light in the day.  They don't like the way it becomes an object when it shines.  It puts on clothes to cover itself up, a modesty we force upon it.  No nudist building colonies or nudist artwork colonies for it to leave to.  Someone might try to make that joke in a grand way, but it would still leave the building sitting there.  Damn.  Just like that I'm done.  It was a good sandwich today, ate it up quick on the bench here.  Sandwiches and the tower.  No sandwich to eat, no more tower to look past, to think at.  Work to be done though.  Deals to be made and weighed.  People to meet who may or may not have wondered about this to themselves, puzzled over the giant pointless point.  And it doesn't matter either way to the world anyhow.

Go in, get out, clean job.

Descent is a tricky business if you don't want to be noticed.  All the trick involved came from the trail you leave, all burning atmosphere and condensing water, jets of dust that accumulated on the hull during space-flight, magnetized there by the cooling process to be shed off in long, thin strands of brown and black and white that descended through the air, following the descent module.  Night might black out the trail, but the heat signature and the light from friction would be there, not that any real monitoring equipment wouldn't pick up all the rest with varying types of sensors and simulations.

Hence the rest of the crew outside, polishing the hull while he kept the big, white egg-shaped device steady behind the planet's sole moon, large for it's planet's size.  That was half of the trail problem that they were solving.  He rubbed a green, bumpy hand across his forehead.  Other than the polishing, the other part was easy.  Fire a few magnetic torpedoes in their path, small ones so they would burn up fast, and then enter in that clear path.  His comm line crackled to life.  "Ten more minutes out here and we'll be done.  A bit more of a buildup than usual, but we're dealing with it well enough."

"Roger."  He wasn't worried about that part.  It would get done as always, as it had been done many times before, many in a more hostile environment than this.  He could see a few off color patches on the hull via the main screen, patches from shots taken when he wasn't so lucky to keep his crew under the radar.  Main problem he had was his lack of ground information.  He flicked the display over to the classified intelligence files that pertained to the mission, holograms sliding out of the display when he rested his eye on the two dimensional models present.

Fooling the naked eye was one thing, and he had that mostly covered.  Heat sinks, pick a good position, go in at night.  It was all the clatter he had to account for on the non-visible spectrum, not all of which were doable on short notice.  The nested spiral design of the enemy structures reminded him of a classified file he had gotten a glimpse at once.  It had been outside of his clearance level, and he hadn't thought much on it until now.  His target had left without too much in the way of long-range sensors, mostly limited to a few miles at most.  His target was also likely to have assimilated some of the native's tech into it's arsenal.  Details on what it was exactly that he was hunting were on a need to know basis, a lip-biting situation when he saw how little it was that they deemed he needed to know.

The natives themselves weren't too much of a threat, not that any recent assessment had brought up, but they had some sensors there.  Last report was from ten years back, and that meant a wide range of progress that may or may not have happened.  He didn't bother much with guessing, finally turning the console back to an outside view.  Play it like they had edged up a bit in everything and hope his target didn't get anything too current to scan with.  He opted for pumping power into the frequency array and try to scramble the vibrations coming off.  Make it seem like a glitch, a blip.  Less focus on hiding the craft from optical light that would come off since it would be night.  Ignore the possibility of radar.  The craft would be going fast and while it was large, it wasn't gigantic, only 55 feet from tip to tip.  He smiled to himself, imagining the blue planet that hid behind the grey moon.  With luck he'd get to see some surprised faces today.