orderofthewordlotus

[orderofthewordlotus]

War drums echoed through the forest, announcing the skirmishes still ongoing across the wooded front line. Distant whumps of magical explosions filled the air, mingling with the panting of the soldiers on the line, desperate to catch their breath in case the fae furyists rallied for another charge.  Thunderous tremors spat dirt into the trench every time one of the monolithic and ancient torchwoods fell.

Captain Clovis raked dirt out of their eyes, and turned to Kayuna with the expression of measured exasperation all career soldiers develop. “Have I mentioned how much I loathe working with you, princess?”

“Only every day, captain,” she replied with a strained smile, “but with the way these battles are going, there are few days remaining. You won’t have to weather me much longer.”

- Dance of the Fae, Jac Eliwood

Can’t believe you folks are sleeping on the Age of Faeries.

I’m gonna post some memes for a fandom that doesn’t exist

[orderofthewordlotus]

Mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb8_uPWhCng

“They tried to purchase the world on a platter—phoned in some favors and now it is theirs.” - Molly Lewis

“You know it brings me no joy!” I screamed, throat spilling my fury at my reflection. “Why don’t you stop!? Haven’t you already gotten what you wanted!?”

She stared back at me, knees rubbed raw in the carpet. Her eyes were puffy, red from too many tears and too little sleep. Her hand pressed into mine, and we held hands this way for a moment, contact as cold as glass. She watched me, I watched her, and we both blinked our tiredness to each other. Little whimpers continued to escape my throat, and she seemed to hiccup along with me.

“What good is any of this if it didn’t work?” We asked each other, and neither of us seemed to have an answer.

I woke up surrounded by my reflection, save for a single figure in black expanded endlessly in all directions, as if cascading into eternity. He looked down at me with the kind of cultivated disdain that only comes from a net worth in the billions. “You look terrible.”

I pressed my palms into the cheap carpet, and started to get up. “Funny,” I replied, hoarse from the morning, “I was going to tell you the same thing.”

“This suit costs more than the combined value of your organs.”

I shot him a half-hearted glare. “And you manage to make it look about as good as a mismatched set of organs. Impressive, you can make decadence look so slick with blood.”

“I give you a room to sleep, and this is how you repay me?”

“So now we both have a history of failing to pay our debts. So far, you’re still a petty tyrant, unrepentant criminal, and now a kidnapper. So I’m still up four to one.”

He spared me a sour glance. “Why do you carry on this way?”

I gestured vaguely at my torn clothing, the clean but cheap futon he’d left in my reflective cell, and up my body, which was bruised and unkempt. “Good life choices?”

“You are insufferable,” he said, “but I still want to do well by you. Do you truly want to keep antagonizing me, or may I move on to the reason we’re both here?”

“Well, the reason you’re here is bribery. I had the gall to run against you. I assume I’m here because no good deed goes unpunished.”

“You’re here because no one speaks ill of me without consequence. However crass your mannerisms, though, I have a kind of affection for you. So instead of killing you in the street, I considered this the more civilized option.”

“Life without parole in a psychopath’s mirrored basement? The least you could’ve done is leave the Boflex machine and cheap boombox.”

He gave me an even look, a single eyebrow climbing up his forehead. I smiled tiredly at him.

He shook his head, “Petulant, petty, and childish. I had hoped, apparently in vain, that you would be grateful.”

I sat down on my futon, and just stared up at him. “It’s amazing. You compare the cost of a tailored suit to the black market price of organs. You kidnap me and expect to be grateful that at least you didn’t kill me? Now that you’ve successfully kidnapped me and have me locked in an infinity mirror with a cheap bed, you expect to be applauded. Your kidnapper was probably underpaid, and still is not worth the cost of an entire life snuffed out because you have an ego so fragile that it cannot go unchallenged without repercussion? As much fun as I’m sure you find being belittled by someone quick-witted, I am not a performing monkey, and I will not reward your misguided sense of charity.”

He stared at me silently, as if contemplating my words.

I got back to my feet, and slammed my fist into his face as hard as I could.

It interrupted his pantomime of empathy, and spilled him onto the carpet. I looked down at him. He sputtered at me, suddenly enraged, and got to his feet hastily. “How dare you.”

“I dare,” I replied, staring emotionlessly back at him.

We stayed this way in stained silence, and I suspected he was wordlessly weighing the pros and cons of murdering me right now, to spare himself the embarrassment of having to do this ever again. He must have concluded his math, because he spun on a heel and started stalking toward the door.

I spoke to his back as the reflective door opened to let him out. “Don’t think for even a moment that you’ve done anything but abhorrent tragedy after tragedy. Now you’re free to do so, unopposed by me, but the only victory worth anything is one you can never take back.”

The door closed, and I saw my reflection staring coolly back at me, eyes still red, right fist bleeding onto the comforter.

[orderofthewordlotus]

I saw her round the corner mid-yawn, and waved a vague greeting.

“Mornin’.” She replied, trudging her oversized beans across the carpet. I suspect the next time she touched me, it was going to shock the nonsense out of me. I started to protest, but instead just put another spoonful of cereal in my mouth. Wiser move to pick one’s battles.

A paw plopped on my shoulder a few seconds later, and zapped the nonsense out of me. “Ow.” I told the air over my bowl.

“Oh, sorry about that.” She replied, leaving her oddly agile paw on her shoulder. “Can you help me?”

“Sure,” I replied, “what with?”

“Open the milk bottle?”

I turned and looked at her. Pink hair, piercingly alert eyes, but every few seconds they would flick in a random direction before settling back on me. I got the distinct impression she was watching motes of dust dance around the early morning light. I shook my head. “You’re lactose intolerant.”

“But I like milk!”

“Yeah, but your stomach doesn’t. You know the rules. No making yourself sick on class days.”

“You’re a tyrant.”

I offered her a smile, “Quite so. Tell you what, I’ll go get a new bottle of almond milk instead, and you can have cereal with me.”

Black quickly took over the green of her eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

I could see her tail thrashing behind her. “Great! Are you going now?”

“I was, yeah. Did you check the weather?”

She glanced out the window, then back to me, tail still thrashing in the air behind her. “Bugs,” she announced.

“Right,” I said, putting on my jacket just in case. “Why’d I even bother asking?”

Opened the door, trudged down the hallway, down the stairs, and up to the corner store. Not too many little shops like this tended to have much, but I was hoping I’d be able to save myself a longer walk, and this one had “Grociers” in the name, which sounded promising.

Turns out I’d gotten lucky, bought a half-gallon, and walked back to my room.

When I opened the door, I saw my bowl upside down, the carpet splattered with milk, and my roommate perched on the table, on all fours, looking in my direction with eyes the size of small moons.

I glared at her. “Really?”

“Wasn’t me,” she lied, entirely unconvincingly.

“And after I did you this favor too. C’mon, lemme pour you a bowl anyway.”

“Thanks!”

I opened the door to the fridge, and found it similarly splattered with milk. The carton had been slashed open with human-scale claws, making a mess of every surface, with the exception of one right about head-height, which had a small handful of tongue-shaped marks where milk was conspicuously absent.

I looked back to her, a bit more emphasis this time: “Really?”

“I didn’t do that either.”

I love catgirls as a concept I hate weebs for making it a horny thing. We as a society could have so much more material if we focused on the comedy aspect instead of making it a fetish

[orderofthewordlotus]

WMG - Ring

You pass an old man toddling around the pharmacy section. “Excuse me,” you ask, “which way to the hardware section?” He points a finger, long and unsteady, toward the far wall of the store. The pharmacy carries with it a sort of enthralling silence, as if the emptiness itself is the gentle lullaby of a mute siren. You nod in reply, unable to form words of thanks.

Walmart is large, a sprawling labyrinth of aisles and shelves. You pass housewares, jewelry, toys, fall fashion, ugly Christmas sweaters, home wares, linens, towels, makeup, toiletries, and medicine. You pass an old man toddling around the pharmacy section. You open your mouth to speak, but the siren continues to weave her web over the entire section. Your mouth opens and closes mechanically, but little more than quiet breathes come out. The old man looks at you, and you stare back. In his gaze, you can feel the motion, the long finger shaking quietly toward the far wall. You nod, escaping the pull of the old man’s gaze, and turn toward the far wall.

You walk.

You pass housewares, jewelry, toys, fall fashion, ugly Christmas sweaters, home wares, linens, towels, makeup, toiletries, and medicine. You pause, and glance behind you. The near wall is not far from you, offering the doorway to the gardening section. Little flashes of green poke through the round port-windows in the doors. You are standing between aisles of mulched wood and consumer fertilizer. You stare at it, as if you expect it to turn into towels, linens, home wares, ugly Christmas sweaters, fall fashion, or toys.

You shake your head, and walk toward the far wall. On your right, you pass an old man toddling around the pharmacy section. You can feel his gaze press into you as you pass. Even the trundling percussion beat of the broken wheel of your cart is silenced as you walk. The siren sings her nothing, you cannot speak, you walk toward the far wall.

You pass housewares, jewelry, toys, fall fashion, ugly Christmas sweaters, home wares, liens, and towels. You pause, and turn behind you. You are standing with your nose centimeters from the wall of the gardening section. The sole employee of this section ghosts by you silently, skirting carefully around the care you left carelessly across the width of the aisle. It smells like terra cotta and misted humidity.

You turn back, and look out over the aisles of makeup, toiletries, and medicine. Then you laboriously turn your cart around, and push it through the double doors of the garden section.

You and your cart spill out of the double doors into the hardware section. You blink for a minute, and take an instinctive step back. Your back flattens against a tall shelf set against the cinderblock wall. You eye the blanched-white paint suspiciously, and then glance down at the dizzying array of rotary saws, blades, and extra batteries.

You shake your head, and walk up the aisles. Power tools, plumbing supplies, rubber tools, and then you get to the aisle you’re looking for. You grab a screwdriver and bit set from the shelf, toss it in your cart, and start pushing toward the front of the store. Back over the rubber tools, plumbing supplies, power tools, power tool accessories, screws, nails, linens, towels, makeup, toiletries, and medicine.

You pass an old man toddling around the pharmacy section. You attempt to open your mouth, as if to ask where the checkout counter is, but you cannot speak. The siren has you. He points toward the center of the store, in the direction of the far wall. You start walking in that direction.

You pass housewares, jewelry, toys, fall fashion, ugly Christmas sweaters...

[orderofthewordlotus]

Suggested mood: Live Forever - Mystery Skulls

The doll, no heavier than as much fluff, felt heavy in my hands. Impossibly so, in fact. “Aw, you-! Always toying with me.” He felt heaviest as I let go, the cold metal of my gold-plated fingers the last bit of warmth he’d feel for a long time. I watched him sink toward the darkness, forever hungry for more.

I leaned over, and gave him a cheery salute, bright red glove painting a macabre slash across the top of my mic. “Whelp! Catch you later, livin’ doll.” I could feel the seething hatred painting phantom trails in the darkness, hot enough to set fire to even the arctic emptiness that waited below. “Say howdy to the ferryman for me!”

He spat something back at me, but I had already stood up and was pacing away. I felt the little lamp in my head flicker to the off position, and I could tell She was done listening to me. Only then did I let my shoulders sag a little, and my industrious pace lost some of its spring. I had a long walk back to the door.

She was berating the lovers when I arrived. They shouted their fury, powerful in its powerlessness here, and She disappeared them. I asked where She’d brought them, and learned the answer. I shuffled my feet a little, losing some of my swagger and turning myself inward, as I always did around Her. I never thought to, I just did. As one should. She has that effect, though She always had.

From the back side, I couldn’t see where the fool and his victim were. Without thinking, I voiced some complaints about them both. Trouble, the pair of them, but the fool chief among them. He had a way of unmaking order, in a way most found amusing but She loathed. Jailed, escaped, captured, lost, found, and lost again. Slippery as a snake and three times as venomous to this world. She spoke to me, and I tried to keep up, keep the shake from my voice, keep the microphone free of the buzzing static that comes from quivering too much. She has that effect on me. I did well to hide it, so I hid it.

My armor cracked when I said the T-word. I should know better, really. He was always the one person I should never mention, even more the television. The fool had once rambled that love and hate weren’t that different of emotions, and though I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, it seemed She hadn’t had enough time to get used to his being gone yet. She’d get over it, or she wouldn’t, but it was wiser to never bring it up. I veered away, though the static of my recoil stuck in my head, reverberating like someone had slammed my head into a gong.

It rang in my ears as I said what I could to make her stop, and I left for home.

It was quieter there. I’d painted the walls with a splash of darkness. Just enough to keep from being too visible in frame, unless someone really looked. I know She kept an eye on her spies, but I was close enough to be sure I wouldn’t be under heavy scrutiny, and the gradient did enough to obscure casual glances to anything but shadows and movement.

So I sat down, and shook until the static in my mind matched the one ringing in my ears. I felt the phantom warmth of the doll I’d just thrown into the emptiness. I heard the powerless thunderstorm that could smash my body to dust be silenced by a sheet. I saw an impossibly young face trust a television dripping with poison. Beyond sight, beyond sound, beyond the passage of the pages, I could imagine the eye that saw all, and how much it shook after She was done with it. The madness that claimed even the ever-patient. The cold that consumed the past. The end that would claim the present. The future that waited for my cousin beyond cells but in the guillotine. I looked at the darkness in my walls and I wondered how long until the eternal white emptiness came and took me.

I shook, hands and body quivering, and felt my body rock in the ugly pantomime of an eyeless man crying.

It stayed this way for a while, conspicuously silent in the cage of my own making, until I went to sleep. Night fell, at Her whim, and morning would come soon enough.

I slept, I woke, I fastened the belief that every life I tossed away prolonged my own, pushed steel into my spine, and opened my door.

There were more lives to ruin.

[orderofthewordlotus]

They shuffled their feet, toes gliding carefully across the polished concrete. The mantra that followed their mind hummed to the rhythm of the fight, inflected with a hint of aristocratic English in the accent, step, step, mind the gap, parry, riposte.

The foil flickered across the intervening space, and they shoved theirs up and forward. The sudden shifting of weight parried the lunge, knocking it off balance, and the return stroke came quick. Their opponent recoiled, but even if he hadn’t overcommitted—which he had—the riposte was too fast. The rounded tip pressed firmly into his chest despite his sluggish retreat.

They took off their helmet, setting it aside and offered a gloved hand to the boy on the ground. “Good effort.”

The boy took the hand, and hefted up to his feet. “Lord, Hiro, you move so fast.”

“Good teacher,” they replied, smiling sweetly. “And practice.”

“Private tutor?” He asked, pulling off his own helmet. “The school only just opened the fencing club.”

Hiro’s smile flickered for a moment, a hint of indecision perhaps, but quickly found itself again. “Something like that. Feels like it was years ago.”

“Oh. Well, can I get a rematch?”

The boy comes out of the gate slower this time, sword tip swirling in gentle spirals. In the mask, Hiro heard little more than the dull whump of the overhead air conditioner, unsuccessfully laboring to keep the gymnasium anything other than sweltering, which left them to focus sharply on the movements of their opponent.

His lunge was fast, but still slower than anything they’d faced in the past. A brief specter of a black-faced creature dove in their vision, but the vision faded as they raised their sword to defend. A bit late, the voice in their head chided, getting stuck in your memories is hardly a good use of your time. Hiro retreated a pair of steps—ha, hardly an unfamiliar maneuver—whipping the tip of their sword left, right, left, and a small quarter-turn before they planted their feet and slipped the following lunge just off its mark.

Hiro pushed forward, launching an offensive of their own. The boy stumbled as he attempted to pull himself into reverse, but he had overdrawn again. Tsk. Hiro extended their hand gently, and the sword tapped gently twice against the boy’s mask.

They both divest themselves of their masks, and set the gear down on the side table while the coach calls two more kids to the strip, and they begin their own bouts.

The boy collapses on the ground, huffing in heavy breaths from lunging and retreating so quickly. “How do you do it?”

Without the bulky armor, Hiro settles into a dignified sprawl, loosely casual, but with all of their limbs contained close. “How do I do what?”

“That tricky swoosh-thing!” He replies, pantomiming an exaggerated arc of an invisible sword. “And before I know it, POW!” With a grand thrust, the invisible sword pierces an unseen foe ahead.

Hiro smiles in reply. “Slower movement for one, motions that large are easy to see coming.”

“And what about all that fancy footwork?”

Another flicker of expression, haunting their thoughts with dreams of an impossible world. “Private tutor.”

“He made you run all the time?”

Forlorn, perhaps, this smile. “More than you know.”

He huffed out another breath, “You’re not even a little tired... I’d Hate to get on your bad side.”

A shudder, almost imperceptible, before they brush their hair out of their face. “I’m not mean, don’t worry.” Their mind treated them to the faintest chuckle, an echo of a former life. “I won’t run you through.”

A long silence.

The boy pipes up suddenly. “Can you teach me how to do that swooshy, stabby thing?”

“Sure.”

They pulled on their coat, heroic green, and went to go find an appropriately-shaped stick. The young boy, all smiles and jubilance, bounces after them.

[orderofthewordlotus]

On the fifth night of the siege, a robed human nursed their sixth drink, painting runes on the bar top with the condensation from the drink.

The doors slammed open, and a young adventurer covered in blood wheezes into the tavern. Acidic rain pelts his bullworm cloak, the howl of the wind screams into the oak room before he can close the door behind him. His face is singed, scarred from acid, and he looks the kind of exhausted that accompanies a long fight.

The barman looks absently up from his glass. “Skeletons still out?”

The adventurer wipes some blood, ichor, and acid off of his cheek. “Yep. Wyverns too. How do they fly with just bone wings?”

“Mysteries of the undead.” The barman replies, still focused on cleaning. “The usual?”

“Whiskey rocks. It’s a hard drink kind of night.”

Barman shrugs, turns around, picks up one of the polished spigots under the counter, and taps one of the higher kegs with a grunt. The splintering wood cracks through the buzzing noise of distant wind, and the tavern settles to relative silence once again.

The lamps flicker quietly as the bartender fills the glass.

The robed patron turns their hood toward the window, makes a noise completely nonlinguistic, and a skeleton crashes sideways through one of the bar windows. The clattering sound of bone and steel peel away from the ripping sound of shattered glass, and the screeching wind goes from distant to furious.

Behind the skeleton, a wraith flows in as sizzling water splashes against the now-broken window frame. The adventurer gets to his feet, and reaches for two empty sheathes before grabbing a third, drawing a rune-etched scimitar from its leather and charged at the spirit.

It screeched, whirled as high as it could in the low-ceiling tavern, and extended its spectral, clawed hands toward the adventurer. Blade met ephemera, reality warped between the two as sparks appeared between the contested wills, and a bulky adventurer in a battered cloak climbed through with a warhammer, careful not to clip the edges of the frame as if it weren’t already in splinters.

“Ah, feck. Sorry ‘bout the windae, Lloyd.”

The barman shook his head, “Long as you’re paying, I ain’t complaining.”

“Ah, nasty spook got through, eh.”

The clawed hand grabs the haft of the blade, and yanks, pulling the adventurer forward, and he scrambles to get traction on the rain-slicked wood. After setting his feet again, he twists his hips and yanks at his sword, trying to get it back. Between gritted teeth, he joins the conversation. “Did it? Hadn’t. Noticed.”

At the bar, the robed figure continues to draw runes.

The newcomer raises his hammer, and turns to the specter. “Last call, laddie. Pay the barman.” With a heft, a pause to get the timing right, slams the hammer down over the ghost. The constant shrieks deflate as the dead oozes into plasma and regrets over the waxed timbers of the bar, mixing with the thin layer of water dribbling in from the window.

“Feckless lot, these.”

In reply, the front wall immediately turns to splinters. Studs rip through the air, hammering into the two warriors. They collapse in lifeless, boneless spills, their fluids joining the growing collection on the bar floor. The barman manages a yelp before he too is eviscerated by the cataclysm of wood, rain, and ghasts that flood in following the collapse of the wall. A lion’s share of the bar joins in the blast, turning to shrapnel and puncturing the vault of casks behind the bar. Drink spills onto the floors as the barman too drops lifelessly to the ground. In half a second, every part of the bar’s front room turns to dust, blood, and history. All save the robed figure, finger still hovering where the bar used to be. All but the base of his drink’s glass shattered and joined the wood in piercing the back wall. A thin layer of energy buzzes just on the outside of his cloak, giving him a halo of haunting red glowing harsh and incendiary against the back wall of the pub.

“...That bastard.”

Ghasts of every color and description flood into the room as the ceiling collapses. Wood, furniture, and piping rain over the robed human, but all seem to part when they get within a few feet. What ghasts survive the avalanche slash forward with raking claws, and turn to cinder the instant they get within a few feet. The robes turn toward where the door used to be, and the human stalks forward. “That was my favorite bar.”

The undead in the streets, ripping holes in houses and clamboring to eat, kill, or absorb the villagers huddling in buildings turn and bellow their hatred of the living as soon as they notice a figure alone in the streets. With the absent wave of a hand, they turn from flesh golems and skeletons immediately to dust, whipped out of existence by the wind and rage of the Dread Lich’s magic. The weather slams against an unseen barrier as the robes billow with flowing magic.

Lips form words as the bubble of red lifts the figure into the sky. “Your little siege was cute, but it’s gone on too long.”

Energy of the rain begins snapping into the growing bubble as it raises into the air, now cresting the rooftops and chimneys of the village. Smoke from the fireplaces, rain, and undead all seem to be absorbed into the bubble, melting in and joining the churning energies as the bubble begins to vortex. Inside, the robed human simple raises a hand toward the lich’s tower. “That is what I am doing tonight. I will poke holes in the sky.”

Any villager that peers from their window would see nothing other than a violently churning orb of red hovering menacingly in the sky, but deeper in the heavens, forces beyond measure begin moving.

On the sixth night of the siege, the tavern has been condemned, the undead cannot get within hundred of feet of the village without getting absorbed into the furious churn of the blood-red orb singing the song of its fury in the sky, and the villagers fear what cataclysm the orb may bring when it chooses to burst.

On the seventh night of the siege, the atmosphere parts.

The mountainous stone that rends the sky glows with white-hot fire, and the fragments that rain with it all shiver with directed fury. As fragments break apart, they fall before being captured by unseen energy, and hurtled back into the mass. The growing meteor of plasmatic fury descends toward the lich’s distant tower, and at 2 AM, it becomes clear to the village that the lich’s siege will not last another night. When asked by the Institute of Magic what happened, villagers will recall a bright flash, an ear-splitting crash, a wall of dust, and when their eyes and ears returned, the furious red orb was gone.

On the morning of the eighth day, the crater grows a single red flower blooming where the lich’s tower once stood.

[orderofthewordlotus]

It had been a few days since I’d gotten in with the solarpunk group, and had time to regroup since my ill-fated venture into the city. Over those days, we’ve walked miles and miles to the south, trudging for warmer climates.

They had a few working cars between them, but they were mostly used for carting the sick, ill, or old, so most of us carried along on foot. When needed, we’d set up camp, the cars would be used as limited scouts, but roads were often impassable as nature and the living dead raged against the skeleton of civilization. Unchecked, both overgrowth and the undying were equally dangerous, so most of our camps and scouting sessions were clipped short by impassable traffic jams or clusters of the dead.

Although most of the group had some hand at combat training, the skills we all brought to the table were scattered. Most of the leadership, such as there was, had a wide range of military and survivalist skills, which were best suited to establishing order among the throngs of bodies. With over a hundred bodies to clothe, house, defend, and feed, it made sense to follow those with the most leadership ability, even if we didn’t all agree with the decisions made. As a whole, the group survived, and it was hard to argue with that.

That said, scouts were a particularly precious resource. Most of the younger folks were skilled runners, and decent fighters, but there was a difference between surviving a skirmish with five of the cool bodies and trying to clear out a shopping mall teeming with them. Even with a skilled shot and a good position, the sheer crush of trampling bodies could survive even our best weapons, so trying to punch a whole in the big clusters was a losing bet.

For my part, Leslie had helped me get settled in as a kind of informal squad leader. Though we weren’t any of the first-call scouts, she introduced me to a handful of younger runners, most of whom had one or two useful skills, and enough talent to get into trouble. I had mostly grown out of that stage myself, but I was still young enough to reach them. At least, that’s what Leslie had reasoned.

For the past few days, I’d made it my job to learn names. The youngest, a Hispanic kid named Luis, was an amazing shot. He had originally helped me break into the gun case I’d pilfered from the car days ago, and then proved he was a steady hand with a pistol. This one was a big revolver, and after showing me how to work the cylinder, left me to practice during out of our marching breaks out in the wooded hills.

Three rounds later, I’d set the thing back in its case, determined to give it to someone who would actually want to make use of it.

The other kids were less memorable, if I’m honest, and I knew it’d be a few more days before I’d really nail down their names. Mark, Thomas... And something else equally white and mundane... Dave? Denny? Mark and the mystery name were classmates, and I rarely saw them outside of meal times. We sat down as a squad, at Leslie’s insistence, but otherwise they were often further up in the marching lines, likely trying to flirt with the women in the support network. Thomas was a quiet kid, probably 17ish, pale brown-blond hair that went down to his eyebrows, glasses too big for his face, and a kind of vacant expression that I associated with shy kids and psychopaths. He stuck with me, largely quietly, but had a kind of erratic attention span I couldn’t help but feel like promised he was probably a survivalist fighter before joining the solars.

Midday during our long trek south, a whistle pierced down the street from the front lines. I was still trying to get used to the complexities of group-wide communication, but several whistles echoed up the line from all kinds of team leaders. Thomas, wordlessly, replicated the piercing whistle at a shocking volume. Two squads further back echoed the whistle, ending with a call from Leslie, barely audible from my position in the line. Squad leaders began echoing the call forward, repeated by Thomas then back up the line.

Before long, the entire procession has stumbled to a stop, and I turned to my kids. “Luis, go find Mark and... Crap, the other guy.” I turned, jabbing two curled fingers in the air—squad preparing, perimeter defense—and looked to Thomas. “You have a weapon?”

He nodded.

“Good. I’ll take Mark and we’ll patrol for the next two hours while the team makes camp. Take Luis and... Christ, what’s his name? Those two will be with you. Stay near to our comb’outs, handle any breaches, and be prepared to take over when our shift ends. We’ll alternate two hour duties until camp is made, then we can work out schedule.”

“Sure thing, boss. Need a weapon?”

“Nah, I’ve got this,” I replied, patting the case, “but hopefully we don’t have any breaches. We’re far enough in the line that hopefully we won’t see any need.”

“Shouldn’t tempt the fates like that boss,” he said, “but we’ll hold it down.”

Two hours later, Mark and I walked up to the kids sitting around a few folding stools, and dropped out packs to the ground. “You’re up. How’s the camp?”

“Mostly there,” Luis said, gesturing as he spoke. “Support’s got them tents mostly up, old folk are in tight, D’s got the perimeter mostly sweeped. All’ats left is gettin’ barracks square.”

“And latrines,” Thomas added.

“That’s always last.” Luis countered, and turned back. “Any noise out of the trees?”

“Nope,” Mark said, “trees are even less chatty than the dead. Quiet night.”

“Tempting fates,” Thomas intoned, somber, and stood up. The rifle slung across his back drifted gently as he stepped out toward the walking patrol. “Channel 2.”

I nodded, and tuned my radio as I sat down, hoping I wouldn’t get called.

[orderofthewordlotus]

I stumbled into the street, feet kicking through the growth of weeds clawing through the concrete sidewalks. The sewers, such as they once were, now existed as nurseries—connecting vast networks of plants that punched holes through the ground where carefully sculpted shrubbery used to be.

Decades after the dead had stubbornly refused to say dead, civilization had lost the centuries long war with entropy. The dead ate, clawed at, and ripped apart too much of the infrastructure to continue running cities, so most of the still-living chose to live as nomads once again, millennia after their ancestors had given up the practice.

So, without streetlights, dodging the signs that nature was reclaiming the land humans had—apparently unsuccessfully—tried to pave over, I ran into the street trying to escape the handful of the dead chasing after me.

I had been doing this for years, and had gotten pretty good at it, but it still caught me by surprise how much they reminded me of life before the Rising had fallen on the world. Media had taught me to expect purple skin, oozing flesh, rotting parts, and a mindless sort of gaping hunger. What the dead provided instead was a kind of macabre cartoonishness. The freshly dead were still sewn into formalwear, skin perhaps a bit pale but otherwise unblemished by the lack of metabolism keeping the meat fresh. The eyes were still sharp, at least enough to look about as tired as the people waiting in line at the coffee shop at 6 AM. They had expressions, like overgrown toddlers, flickering between smiles and glowers and glares in rapid beats, but never slack-jawed or vacant.

Five of them chased me, and I ran along the shadow of 9th and Western. Most of the streets were still level, but there were a few avenues whose foundation had fallen to the unstoppable growth of the subterranean forests. I knew enough to know which streets would get me killed, so I continued weaving in and out of the street, occasionally pausing to mount cars or slipping through the shattered window of a passing storefront in order to avoid the spots where I knew the concrete wasn’t far from collapse.

The highway was only a few miles ahead, and if I got there, I would probably find enough moving traffic that the dead behind me wouldn’t have the sense to dodge, and my chase would end as they always do.

Body parts and guilt.

A smallish hand caught my shirt, and I spun wildly, whipping my body in hip rotation. The second hand went for my wrist, and I sent the creature into a sprawl through the glass display case still containing some old watches. The glass broke in furious response to the trespass, and I watched the young, dead girl’s scalp get split bloodlessly to the bone. I didn’t stick around to watch her get up. I knew she would, and I cared very little for beating a bloodless girl to death again, so I just climbed out of the plate glass window leading to 22nd, and ran for the highway.

Night hadn’t descended in full, so I knew I was safe keeping to the streets. While there were still plenty of cars that ran, cars with functional headlights were more rare. Most had generator-powered headlamps, but running in the street with limited visibility was a good way to get mistaken for the shamblers and shuffled from the mortal coil.

Vines had taken over the on ramp, and I knew had I been in a vehicle, I would’ve grounded myself in the rampant growth trying to drive onto the highway here. The cars mostly eaten by vines had made that reality all too clear. I checked the windows—more absently than not—as I passed, and paused when I saw something black sitting in the passenger seat. It was a small case, still locked with a thin-looking padlock, that I recognized as a gun case.

I tried the door, looking over my shoulder to see the post-mortals behind me hosting their own personal moshpits trying to drag their limbs through the vinery. I probably had long enough. The door didn’t open, so I rolled over the hood, planting solidly on the other side, and tried the driver door. The body inside promptly turned to me, smiled a partially toothless grin, and reached for me.

I grabbed one of the wrists, dropped to be level with my hips, and used the full rotation of my body to huck the body into the weeds downslope. At least, the part of the body that came free from the seatbelt. Most of the legs and abdomen had been left behind.

Rot is gross.

I yanked the legs out into the shrubbery and grabbed the case. “Crap,” I told the lock, and just took the whole case with me up slope. Can’t believe I forgot about the lock.

Traffic was unusually quiet, though with winter approaching, it wasn’t all that surprising that most of the groups would be moving south rather than up here. I transferred to the opposite side of the highway—more out of habit than respect for traffic laws—and started my slow, shuffle-footed, shambling jog south.

I’d never been much of a marathoner, but if I didn’t get a lot of distance between myself of the sleepless pursuers, I’d be lucky to wake up at all after I stopped. So I ran, and hummed a rhythm in my head I hoped was close to the ideal tempo for my leg length.

About six miles up the road, my form was ragged, my lungs ached, I hadn’t eaten enough to merit the long run, and I was becoming increasingly afraid I was running toward a pack of the dead more than away from the small collection following me. I could tell I was gaining on some enormous pack in the distance, but not very quickly. If they noticed me, I’d probably be toast.

I continued another mile, somehow pulling one last stretch out of my aching legs, but I couldn’t run any more. Just as I was about to collapse, a group of lights hit me all at once.

“Oooh, this one’s still fast.”

“Think that’s a live one, Frank.”

“Out here? Alone? On foot?”

“Stranger things.”

“I’m going to shoot it.”

“Wait!” I tried to shout, but weakly. My arms shot into the air. Well, sorta. Shoulder height. I was exhausted.

“Did it just speak?”

“Told’ja.” The thickest body of the bunch walked into the cone of light, dressed in surplus fatigues and had a flashlight on the end of some military-looking rifle. Probably an AR-15, but I’d heard rumors of military armories dotting the States still having the real, automatic hardware. This one was kitted with a flashlight, which was stabbing me in the eyes.

“Can you speak?”

I mumbled some kind of affirmative, but it wasn’t very verbose. Even breathing hurt after that run.

There was a long pause, and I wondered if I’d get shot. “Was that a yes?”

I slowly pantomimed drinking. “Wa-ter?”

On reflex, the hip pocket materialized a small plastic bottle—like those they used to have in grocery stores—and tossed it underhand to me. I bumbled the catch, but picked it up off the floor, dusted it off hurriedly, and cracked the cap. Warm, but heavenly. Honest to goodness, store-bought water.

“Ugh. Yeah, I’m alive. And can speak.”

“Cool. Name’s Leslie. You have any friends following you, stranger?”

“None living,” I said, shaking my head, “though I think I lost the dead ones a few miles back. They’re headed this way, but these aren’t runners or anything.”

“Where you headed?”

“Someplace with more living than dead, hopefully.”

“Good goal. You want to run with us for a bit?”

“Depends on who ‘us’ is, I think. I appreciate the water, but I don’t know you from Adam.”

“Don’t know me from Eve,” she corrected gently, “but we’re solarpunk.”

“Christ, really? I thought you folk were a rumor.”

“A walking rumor at the moment,” Leslie replied, peering over at the receeding group in the distance, “think you still have some walk in you?”

“If I don’t, I’ll have flesh in them, so I’d better.”

“Good, let’s roll.”

[orderofthewordlotus]

For as long as I could remember, objects had voices. None so extreme, just a quiet echo of what I imagined to be that object’s past. Or personality. Perhaps some quirk of its creation. Or, more than anything, just an idle musing of my imagination. This object, like many others, reminded me of a film. It was a little overdrawn, perhaps a touch British. Inflected with both King Candy and Willy Wonka. “Do you hunger?”

I gazed down at the Altoid tin, which yawned open as I flipped the top. A small, cartoonishly exaggerated “Ahhhhh.” followed, as if I were a doctor administering a tongue depressor. Instead, my fingers found an empty tin, free of any mints. “You’re empty.” I told it.

“Yet you hunger.”

The echo of another voice, charged, jubilant, even foolish, but perhaps also wise. It echoed in my head. “Eat it.” An imperative that sounded less absurd the more its syllables bounced about my skull. My eyes narrowed. Impossibly intense. The tin gleamed with the sunlight. My focus emptied out all but the most immediate focus. The tin suddenly sounded scared, the jovial levity lost to a fearful realization. “Do you hunger?”

My lips peeled back, baring teeth as I lowered my face toward it. It was my turn, jaw flipped open. An impossibly large, dangerously hungry “Ahhhh.” sang my mind’s voice in a voracious mockery of the voice that came before. The aluminum seemed to clack and jolt as I chewed. The voice in my mind wheezed, but I continued clenching my jaw against the metal.

Small shavings littered my table as I continued my meal.

I regarded the sole remaining shavings, and spoke. “Lov the cronch.”

ive almost emptied another altoid tin what do i do with it

[orderofthewordlotus]

The laundry machine was full, and the man reached up to grab the detergent. The small room, constantly buzzing with the electric buzz of flourescents and the rumble of neighboring machines running, quickly filled with the smell of cleansing flowers and herbs.

The man poured the translucent blue into the column, and closed the lid on his machine. One jab of an errant finger activated the internal motors, and it began filling the central tub. Another machined stopped, and the man sat down in an errant chair, and spaced out, breathing in the scent of lavender.

As the man dozed absently, chair propped up on two legs, the sound of the door opening jarred him out of his reverie. The chair slammed back on all four legs.

The laundry machine was full, and the man was pouring himself a vial of detergent. Further into the room, another man was pulling his wet clothes from the washing machine, and was pacing across the room to dump them in the dryer. It took him another two drips, despite the laundry machine only large enough for maybe half of a load.

Detergent poured, machine started, the stranger spoke. “My grandpappy gave me two good pieces of advice in life. Don’t antagonize nothin’ that hunts when you edible. An’ the only mistake ain’t solvable by burnin’ it down is settin’ too much stuff on fire.”

The smell of lavender seemed to fill the room, and the stranger continued speaking. “Hell, boy, I found that first piece’a advice too useful ta not follow. That sec’und’s a real squirmy one, though. Ain’t one of us get through this life ‘thout a han’ful’a mistakes. Pappy weren’t wrong, fire sure can fix’a lotta ‘em.”

The machines seemed to grow louder, and the stranger leaned into the man’s face. “Fact, I feel like I maybe seen you before. You ain’t never report no crimes, have’ya? Arson, ‘haps?”

The flick of the lighter called the man’s focus down.

The laundry machine was full, and the man poured the detergent straight from the oversized bottle all over the clothes, not caring to measure beforehand. The laundry room around him was wall-to-wall windows. The low, humming machines churned into the empty room, the single florescent light flickered on and off with sporadic rhythms, buzzing and fading in uneven percussion. The world outside the laundromat, a normally bustling city to the man’s memory, was bathed in a low mist that obscured anything more than a few long strides beyond the doors and windows.

He man started the machine, and stepped over to the windows, pressing his hand against the glass as he leaned up to look closely. The cafe across the street glowed a pale orange, muted by the sepia-toned windows that promised a low, moody light for the patrons inside. It was probably quieter there, than the eclectic rhythms and formless machinations of the cheap laundromat he found himself in.

All he had to do was open the door and walk across. There’s no reason not to, in fact. Time seemed to drift away from him, and he stared at the warm colors of the coffee shop, piercing through the cool, white haze of the misty morning. He foot scuffed the metal, and he quickly realized he’d moved without intending to. The sudden cool metal of the door handle was under his palm as he started to push outside. The metal grating under the door rattled when he kicked it, and he flinched with sudden surprise.

The laundry machine was full, and his robes took up the better part of both machines. “Do I have enough quarters?” He asked his costar, a woman wearing nothing but a dotted pink bra and yoga pants.

“For both machines?” She replied, looking up from her magazine. “Probably not.”

He fished in his pockets, pulling two quarters and a handful of discarded wrappers and pennies. “I guess you’re right.”

Her voice, high and melodious, sang out from behind his field of vision as he spun around toward the machines, looking for accidentally dropped coins on the ground. “Am I ever not?~”

He found a dime, two nickels, and another quarter, which was enough to start at least one machine. The rumbling of the three machines running in tandem made conversing difficult. “Can I borrow a quarter?”

She smiled a wicked smile at him, “And what will I get in return?”

“The ability to settle the bet with Trevor. I’m going to try washing the crown.”

The wicked smile added a hint of pink and grew wider. “Ooooh, Wardrobe won’t be happy. You’re a wicked boy.”

She reached for her top to grab the coin she had concealed within it, and his gaze lowered toward

The laundry machine was full of birds, and he turned to the woman hanging up rows of corn cobs from the laundry line just outside the back door. “Um... Ma’am, you’re not supposed to wash... uh... birds here.”

She turned, clad in a glorious robe of feathers, and leveled a flat gaze in his direction. Her voice sounded soft, hinting at little melodies hiding in every syllable. “I am not a ma’am. One would imagine, but those are not living birds, dear boy. That is my crown.”

He paused, “If not ma’am, then..?”

The reply was at once instant, and and languidly regal. “King.”

“Then... my liege, please permit me a question, why is your crown made of dead birds?”

“Your mortal artisasns, they weave together materials to make the cloths, do they not? Cloaks and tunics and such?”

“Um. Yeah.”

The King’s smile quickly reminded me of a raven’s caw. “Corpses are materials.” The intensity of the King’s gaze seemed to crush him, and he quickly averted his gaze down to

The laundry machine was rusted over, sat disused on the crest of a deep hill. The man’s hiking gear, gleaming and pristine compared to the grown over and corroded slice of modern appliance. The flowers in the field around him and the machine danced with the light breeze, caressing his boots and pushing at the vine-ridden overgrowth around the discarded and woefully out of place appliance.

He leaned against the machine for a moment, and watched the horizon. The flowers joined the symphony of leaves from trees all around the bluffs, and he watched for a moment, a single gloved hand resting on the browned lip of the machine. Tiny pebbles around his feet shuffled downslope, joining the chorus. For a brief moment, he thought he felt his foot slipping, and jerked his head down toward

The alarm clock blared noisily in his bedroom apartment, and he lurched uneasily in bed before crawling out of his covers. His bedroom, dark in the early-morning AMs, was cold, and he sneezed.

“Ugh, I hate NyQuil dreams...”

[orderofthewordlotus]

Detached

The earth parted beneath the steel of the shovel, and RGB huffed through the strain to continue parting the tough, dense clay of the Ravine of Emptiness. Though RGB never truly found absolute truth in the rumours that surround this place, he felt it an appropriate spot. He’d imagine she’d have agreed.

It was raining by the time they’d found shelter for the night. A small spattering of trees just before the Melancholy of Dreams. The purple and blue haze that shimmered in the night sky no-doubt evoked memories of the Aurora Borealis from Hero’s home world, but to him, it just seemed like a horrifying landscape of ceaseless running. The dreams in the sky were harmless for most, but he refused to sleep there himself. “We should turn in for the night here.” Earlier in the journey, she’d resisted the idea of sleeping in gloomy settings like these. A dark forest, leaves blocking the light of the sky is exactly the place she’d have hated to rest. RGB reigned in his approval, and settled in to sleep at the base of a dark-wooded tree.

The clouds in the Ravine of Emptiness always looked grey and ominous over the earthy bluffs that stretched hungrily into the sky. Yet it never rained here. Part of why he picked it, probably. No rain, no chance for an interrupted burial.

(”...Just this once, mind.”)

Their legs churned in the early morning light, kicking up rainbow-coloured patterns in the sky as their feet’s locomotion kicked up the few dew from the grass. They weren’t far, now, from finishing the plan. Finalizing what needed to be done. RGB looked forward to the end, knowing full well what the journey may cost him. As it should be, perhaps, because his story was never meant to be here. But, it was a story he could not escape. Realized not from this world, but for it. Or, so he speculated.

They’d intercepted the duo just at the barrier of the Melancholy. In numbers RGB had never seen, numbers that dwarfed even the hero’s ceaseless bravery and unyielding optimism. Her face flickered through a range of emotions in a few seconds, but she planted her feet, and looked ahead. RGB wondered, briefly, if she expected him to be able to get out of this. No one could get out of this. He offered his hand out, sounding as whimsical as he didn’t feel “We’d best run through. Shall we?” Fear gripped him as tightly as her fingers, and they ran into the chaos.

The clay filled in the schism, painting the pink flesh the same burnt red as the jumper that covered it. Her hands were clasped together, serene in the cold afternoon air. RGB just dug his shovel back in the freshly moved clay, and tossed another mound of the Ravine’s flesh onto the pile.

(”Impressive. Did you actually find a bigger fool than you?”)

He’d lost his hand at some point. A fear, perhaps, or something a bit on the sharper side. They’d been running for minutes, through an unspeakable hoard of Everything, and minutes stretched impossibly long in combat. As a general rule, RGB didn’t bow to pain, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that overwhelmed this moment. This was it. This had to be it. There wouldn’t be anything left after this.

She screamed, a horrifyingly vulnerable sound, and RGB pulled hard at her arm. The fear’s snout had found the schism, puncturing into it again with fresh interest. Despite being pierced straight through, she had the grimace of a fighter, entirely unwilling to give up. She managed a weak nod, legs still working. They kept running.

The shovel echoed across the crags as he slammed the shovel down, again and again, against the clay. Metal shouted its fury against Earth, and RGB beat his fury into the heavens. The sound of his emotions, more raw than those that dripped from him, slammed the earth into submission. Not even the unyielding void of the Emptiness could contain him right now. He thrashed into the Earth, and nature silenced in fear of the monster who claimed the entire ravine with his war drum.

(”That’s how you can tell.”)

They’d been cornered. RGB was careless, but he was injured too, though he hid it from her. He always had, though, so she could scarcely be expected to notice. His jacket had been slashed apart, discarded in the Melancholy. Either a glove or hand was missing, and he was honestly too tired to know the difference himself. They were too close to turn back now, they just needed to soldier on. She had started coughing at some point, and without telling himself to, he’d picked her up and carried her in his arms as they covered the last of the distance. Just one more fight, or so he’d lied to himself, and then he could be free, for better or worse.

The Ravine of Emptiness was said to take away things. Though not as potent as █ █ █ █ █ █, but his fury could not be drowned out. The heavens were rent by the sound of steel on bare earth, and the monster raged in silence.

(”You– didn’t do the thing.”)

The landscape was warped, impossibly white, as if consumed by Something. Or Nothing. Or perhaps All Things. Hatred had unmade this part of the world, and RGB mourned its loss, quietly resenting everything that had brought him, and his ward, to this moment. He wished, impossibly, that it could be over without so much loss. Already, too much. The particulars left him, as it always did in these moments. There was banter, undoubtedly, but he could remember none of it. His mouth moved on its own, saying whatever it must, but it came to blows, as it always does. There is no stopping a hate that powerful. He knew that, certainly. He was “bleeding,” such as he does, all the way here, carrying her still form in his arms. Passed out, asleep? He had no way of knowing. They fought, and he prayed to spare enough time for the hero to save everything. His time was up, he was cornered. He awoke in a mound of bodies. Fears, griefs, doubts, even Hate, in a pile before him. There was so much carnage. Perhaps the True Monster had finally arrived, won through brute force alone. He looked for her. Hoping he wouldn’t find her body. She was still where she laid originally, seemingly untouched, shoulders maybe moving with breathing, he could hardly tell. As he rose to check, he heard it. Hate was behind him. He’d dropped his guard. This would be it. When the final blow came, he flinched, cowardly to the end. When he looked up, Hero stood over him, schism torn across the small, childlike body. Too small, too fragile, and she crumpled. The noises came out as but a whisper. The rasp of her voice tore into his soul, every word labored. The pause between every word killed him further. “You. Can’t. Fight. Hate.” Those were her last words. He left, battle unfinished, with a small body in his arms.

When he shook from his reverie, the all-consuming void had returned to the Ravine of Emptiness, and he was laying in a puddle of blue and red. His trousers were stained in it, his gloves lay tattered, discarded at some point after he’d begun digging, and his hands were bathed in red and blue, presenting the outline of a hand, ungloved, that he’d not seen in years. Blue and red continued to plop near-silently in the absorbing expands of the Ravine, and he stared at the freshly pounded earth, at a loss for what to write.

(”Careful, you mustn’t get attached to her.” “Oh, please. As if I’d do a thing like... that...”)

What even was her name?

[orderofthewordlotus]

Taking a deep breath, I pushed my will into the wooden column, and the entire building thrummed to resist me. I leaned against the current of energy thrashing through the timbers, and it tried to force its way into my mind in reply.

For a moment, my mind sang with pain as the energy tried to fight its way into my body, but I managed to hold it back, keeping the rushing tide from hammering into me. The headache that formed in its wake throbbed cheerily at me, and I could faintly hear a growling that was probably mine hang in the air of the shop.

This particular part of the process was often one of the hardest, and I had been dreading finishing the wards on this place for the last few weeks. But, I couldn’t put it off any longer, if for no other reason than I might put it off forever if I did.

The energies thrumming around the shop were always in motion, dancing gleefully around the circuit I’d set up. It was a winding script of a spell, intent on using every square foot of the shop as efficiently as possible, and after several months of pouring proverbial gallons of juice into the thing, any failure point would vent enough energy to take out the city block in the first few seconds. If it went all at once, probably the city. My head ached, and I tried not to dwell on how high a metaphysical voltage I was playing with.

The energies were more slippery than I wanted, made over many months. Some of them were inflected with the moods I’d carried when I’d filled the place. The cheery moods were easy to corral, and fell into a rhythm with the next closest flurries without much coaxing. The mundane moods brushed about with clinical efficiency, and became the standard on which I set the rest of the patterns. Depression had to be accelerated, which took some more energy but sorted itself out quickly enough. Anger was next, and thrashed violently enough to offset most of the other streams. I slowed it down as best I could, focusing on the bends to slow its fury while it coursed around the storefront, but it wasn’t enough. I ended up catching whole stream of it as it passed by me in the circuit, and I took it in my hands. There was a lot of it, and the dull lurching pangs between my ears developed a few sharp notes. Some of that energy got vented off into the air, but I spent most of a half hour reshaping it and sending it back out.

The energies had found a steady rhythm, and the creaking the building had picked up over the last month stopped. I paused, taking in the silence for a brief and victorious moment, then set to slowing the energy down. Static danced across my fingertips as I traced runes into the air, a sprawling scrawl of text, energy, intent, and a cypher I had memorized in the third grade. The energy began to slow to a crawl, and I wrote as fast as my arm could move, feeling the energy I’d left in the air zapping from finger to finger, charring my fingernails and leaving blisters across my hands. The text snapped into place in the air, harmoniously locking the various energies in place, which also froze the energy dancing around the woodwork of the building to absolute stillness.

Then, methodically, I began to gesture, more with my mind than with my hands, and the energies sprouted a mesh of bands that dug into the wood. Invisible, they clawed their way into the building itself and shored up its shape. The entire building, if viewed through the astral, would look like it was splitting at the seams with neon, but every part of the energy network had clamped down with the physical network of wood holding the walls and roof together. I took some extra minutes, thanks to a bit of luck in the energy making an effective enough web on its own, and worked it into the foundation too.

Spell done, I double-checked every corner I could think to look at before I growled a word in French, and slashed merrily across the hovering text. The shattering of the characters in the air crammed my eyes open to the real world for the first time in the better part of an hour, and my metaphysical senses sounded like someone had just shattered glass over my head. The headache I’d grown over the course of the spell certainly left the impression of having a bottle smashed over my head, but at least the spell was done. I wouldn’t have to wrestle with it for a few years, at least.

The break room, a dinky little corner in the back, smelled like brimstone and burnt coffee. I sighed, picked up my burnt-out materials, tossed ‘em unceremoniously into the trash can. Then I grabbed the coffee pot, popped the plastic lid onto the counter, and tossed the now tar-looking black goop into the trash can. I paused for a moment, in case some of the material in the trash would react to the tar (it’s happened before), and started another pot once I was convinced nothing in my trash was developing sentience. I checked my watch, saw my lunch break was ending in less than five minutes, and sighed. So much for actually eating.

I walked to the front, sidestepping around the shelves of curios, knicknacks, crystals, and a few honest focuses and spellbinding agents. Most of the stuff up front was for tourists, and as small as some focuses are, the good stuff was kind of a shoplifting risk anyway. I flipped the sign next to the door—”Hi! We’re Open Now!” with a comically oversized, cartoon smiling face—and went to go settle into the stool behind the counter.

After fifteen minutes later, I was absently staring at the small trail of black smoke drifting lazily into the air from my fingernails, when a customer walked in. She was wearing a pink letterman jacket, sporting Federation University in big, tech-looking letters across the breast (and FU across the back, inevitably). Her hair was no fewer than three colors more at home in cotton candy than on heads, and she was probably too old to rock the jacket without social repercussions, but smiled the faux-smile I associated with women about to ask me for something I’d have to tell them “No” to.

“Do you have any healing crystals?”

I gave her the look that such a question deserved, and held it for a moment trying to assess whether or not she realized the absurdity of her request. After a pregnant moment’s pause, I answered, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Short answer? Healing magic is really complicated, and any enchantment of healing on anything would cost more than this entire building. If I had either the income or personal talent to enchant anything with healing, I could pay for this city’s collective retirement in a few hours. To enchant a crystal, notorious for resisting any but the most finesse even European spellslingers would goggle at, I could pay for the county’s retirement. To carry more than one could pay for the national debt. So, I don’t.”

“Sandra over at eBound has them for $2.95 a piece.”

“No, Sandra over at eBound has copper-containing Sunstone at $5.95 a piece, which while pretty, won’t actually mend flesh wounds. Healing crystals, the stuff that can actually mend bones if enchanted right, costs about $138,000 a stone, and that’s through my special contact. Most cost several hundred thousand and up.”

“Couldn’t you enchant a sunstone to do that?”

“Me? Oh hell no, I don’t touch anything that complex. I’m way too young for that. Someone could, but sunstone isn’t ideal for water-based magicks like that. Even if you succeeded in enchanting that kind of spell into the rock, a dicey proposition at best, the enchantment would probably fizzle in a few hours.” I sighed, and leaned over the counter. “I could save you the raw materials, time, training, experience, know-how, and thousands in failed efforts and tell you now that ten carat Grandidierite is probably the cheapest stone you want to put any health-related enchantment into. It’ll hold for at least a few months.”

She scowled at me, a look that would’ve been much more imposing in colors other than pink, and jabbed at my chest with her pointer finger. “If you don’t have healing crystals, what good do you have?”

“I’m probably the best and cheapest in town if you need any hand-carved spell focuses. I have a few of the first and second printings of Hans Christian Anderson grimoires in the Special Books section. But if you’re in my shop, chances are someone dared you to come in here and ask me if I have a copy of Battletoads.”

“What?”

I gestured vaguely around her face, leading a trail of smoke up one of her nostrils. “I do magic.”

She sneezed, glaring at me. “But you can’t do healing.”

“I’m certified to do first aid by the state.”

“What?”

“No, I can’t do healing. But most maguses can’t. That puts me in with 85 percent of casters in the world, which is fine odds given I’m cheaper than most of the locals. I can even do home service, something I don’t think anyone else in this area does.”

“So... Do you do weight loss?”

“Only when I diet and exercise. Do you mean like a weight loss enchantment?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I mostly deal with enchanting accessories, focuses, and the like. You’re talking about fluid enchantment, alchemy, which isn’t my specialty. I can whip up a weight loss potion for you, though, if you’d like.”

“How much does that cost?”

“Depends on how much of it you need.”

“You’re the specialist, you tell me.”

I paused, taking in her smug looking stance from over the counter. About five seconds into staring at her stretchy yoga pants, and idea comes to me. “I think I have the thing, give me a few minutes.”

I ran into the back room, grabbed one of the plastic cups restaurants give out from the top shelf, and filled it with the fluid I think she was looking for. I grabbed a McDonald’s lid from a soda I’d left sitting on the counter from lunch yesterday, dumped the rest of the drink (and the straw) into the trash—which thankfully didn’t make a chomping noise when I did. Don’t ask—and grabbed a pink straw with a bendy top from a box I kept next to the tea leaves, and walked back to the front with my Frankenstein’s-assembled-drink on the counter.

“Alright, so you know how enchanted potions work, right?”

She stared at me like I’d started speaking Greek while making rude gestures at her. “No.”

“Alright, so magic comes from a lot of things, but the external factors are pretty simple. Typically, they require one or more of three things: ceremony, materials, and catalysts. Ceremony is usually pretty simple: say a phrase, do a gesture, dance the funky chicken, that sort of thing. Material is mostly for the magic-making. Since this stuff is already enchanted, you don’t have to worry about that. The third is catalyst, something needed to start the magic going. This is a potion, so its catalyst is already mixed in. Well, technically, the potential is already mixed in. For most potions, the drinker is the catalyst. So that’s you.”

She continued to stare at me like I’d grown a second head. Because I tend to gesture when I speak, I wondered briefly if she was staring at my black fingernails. Or the blisters. Or both.

“Right, so for this potion, you’re going to need to get your core temperature up. Since you don’t seem to do any spellcasting yourself, I recommend light exercise. Fifteen minute jog, climb some stairs, do hot yoga, that sort of thing. Also, heart rate. So you’ll definitely want to mix in some cardio. Once you’re good and hot, take this potion.”

For a long moment, she just glared at me. I smiled sweetly, and popped the lid on the cup. “By the way, this is just water. From the sink. What I just described was exercise. You should also hydrate.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“You asked me to make you a weight-loss potion. This potion will help you lose weight, so long as you exercise, drink plenty of it, and don’t eat too much fat.” I stared at my hand, more specifically the lid in it. “Like McDonald’s, for instance. Do as I say, et cetera.”

“You’re also not funny.”

“Speak for yourself, these past five minutes have been hilarious for me.”

She glared at me one last time, and stomped back out of the shop. I watched her go, pondering briefly why anyone would have “JUICY” spelled out across their butt on purpose. Then, after a moment’s consideration, dunked my fingertips into the cup of water sitting on the counter. The smoke abruptly stopped, and I sat back in my stool.

Tourists...

You’re a mystic who runs a shop full of mysterious artifacts and potions and you’re sick of uninformed middle-aged suburban moms asking for energy crystals and herbal weight-loss mixtures while throwing around made-up terms.

[orderofthewordlotus]

“We’re going to be late.”

He sighed internally, Of course we’re going to be late, you’ve been putting off getting ready for an hour. He forced himself to a smile, an expression he didn’t feel, and gently nudged the door open. “No worries, we’ll make it.”

The rest of the apartment was a hurricane of activity. The other three roommates were bustling around, making an even bigger mess of his organization, if that were at all possible. The hallway was a flurry of voices all piling in to one another, asking if anyone had seen this hat or that blanket around.

He shuffled his feet, trying not to seem too aware of the movement or flinch slightly at the sudden, loud voices. He sat on the couch, and opened the book he had been carrying in his pocket. The world seemed to slow for a minute, and as if in a wide angle lens, the edges blurred into his focus. The noise persisted for a while, but before long, he was sitting in his own little tunnel, the words lifting from the page until they had wrapped around him.

The kingdom was a difficult one to wrap his head around. Although they spoke expressively of geography on the page, it was something he was never able to imagine well in his head. Back in his room, buried in a drawer undoubtedly under some stationary, were efforts to draw some kind of map, render some kind of sketch, but ultimately imperfect efforts to give physical life to the locations the pages washed over with ink.

However, while the lands’ relation to each other were alien landscapes to him, he found a great deal of joy imagining the lands themselves. This forest would have been beautifully green, lush with the kind of teeming life that would fill the trunks with noise. Although it’s never said on page, he imagined the soft thrum of insects as they buzzed away, guided by their instincts, giving the entire forest a small blanket of white noise. The sound of plant life being shouldered aside by occasional small animals. The heroes’ footsteps sounding like an army marching through the growth. Pounding, metallic boots crunching into a blanket of dead leaves and smashing into roots. They walked together, likely sharing stories of adventures they’d had previously. Helping the hours of trekking go by with the product of good comp-

The world shattered for a moment, and he jolted as one of his roommates gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “Y’alright, Cameron? We should go, the others are already in the car.”

He shook his head, pocketed his book, and adjusted his prop glasses on his nose. “Of course.”

The duo made their way along the flights up stairs. Although he did more reading than adventuring these days, he always had to suppress an urge to take off running up or down stairs. The small, childlike presence still bouncing joyfully behind thoughts of rent, bills, work, and the other mundanities of adult life still wanted to enjoy the act of running up or down stairs. To feel the wind rushing by his ears.

Instead, he continued to walk in step with his companion, and climbed in the car with a handful of other costumed college kids. The sounds of the street, once they got underway, helped transport him back into his current novel.

Although he didn’t ignore his roommates, there was always a bit more joy in books. Their worlds were patient, he had time to really come to grips with the details he enjoyed, rather than feeling rushed to the next experience. He liked getting to know people, not just who they are, but how they got there. The passing lights of the city danced in the window, giving him brief distractions from his thoughts. But the background, the curiosities, the little vignettes that made up integral aspects of their life, they pulled him back into his reverie. All of it was exactly how he hoped to know everyone in his life, as summaries of moments that painted a beautiful mural. Or, at least, something that reflected the beauty that everyone harbored, whether they reflected it in their life or not.

Soon, they were on the bridge, probably five minutes from their destination. The clacking of bridge’s metal grates held a small fraction of his focus.

Ca— He heard something, though, and was jarred out of his book once again. “Car?” The word had hardly registered on his hearing, and in looking up, saw the tail end of an expensive-looking SUV spin wildly into the hood. Time froze for a moment, and everything happened at once.

Pieces of glass rained against the windshield. A spiderweb of cracks and safety glass kept the deadly hail from entering the old Civic that his roommate was driving. On either side of him, two of his costumed roommates slammed into the backs of the car’s front seats, rebounding back into theirs entire lifetimes later. The cars around them were slamming onto their brakes, filling the air with shrieks of rubber while the sound of crunching metal continued to constrict around him.

His left ear registered pain before the rest of him caught up, and his larger roommate piled into him. All three of them in the back were forced to the side as their side of the car crunched inward, plastic shattering into fragments as the metal siding on the car warped in the stress. The window had buckled, and the cabin began filling with airborne glass as the car’s left wheels tipped into the air. The sound of brakes, metal, and fury were still filling all of his thoughts, when more metal found the trunk, lurching all five of the car’s passengers into a brief moment of weightlessness, until gravity asserted itself and the car started to fall once again. Then, in a perfect storm of impossibility, a distant crash lead to a closer crunch, lead to a nearer shriek of tires, and the car lurched violently into weightlessness again.

The cabin, for the briefest of moments, was in a perfect state of weightless suspension, glass drifted impossibly slowly across his field of view, then the metal to the car’s left gave way under its massive weight, and reality spun.

Three of the car’s occupants slammed into the roof, arms and legs pinwheeling in a sprawl. He gave a panicked look to the windshield, which showed hints of blue through the blanche-white cracks that covered its length. He turned, seeing the blood splashing unbound from the other passengers’ bodies into the air. Still spinning, the entire car managed to point it’s right side down toward the lake they were inevitably going to crash into. For reasons even he’s not sure, his last thoughts before slamming into the surface were Oh great, this is how I die. I knew I should have taken swimming lessons.

The window hammered into the water, bodies surged into his, and the world disappeared.

[orderofthewordlotus]

The air hurt to breathe.

People rarely think about that with fires. They always imagine the smoke inhalation or the fire burning the skin, but rarely to they think of breathing in the superheated air. She certainly hadn’t, and as she pelted into the woods, fire lashing in all directions, she could have never imagined that it would hurt so much. Deep inside, deep within her chest, it felt like there were little needles in the air, which raked her mouth, throat, and lungs as she ran.

“Debora!”

Of course, they wouldn’t understand. There was no guarantee of life in the cabin, and a near-perfect guarantee of death in the flames, but she ran anyway. The women continued to scream from the road. “Debora! Stop!”

Only when it’s done, she thought to herself. Only then.

The woods were completely engulfed in flames. Although the path had been kept fastidiously clear of brush, and likely the only reason she had a path through the woods, the rest of the space was bathed in flame. In addition to the sting of smoke, the air was crushingly hot. Her breath grew more shallow with every step into the inferno, as if her lungs were shrinking away from the task of accepting air. Her throat ached, her eyes were burning, but she was only a little bit further out from the cabin.

The clearing around the family cabin was, at most times, beautiful. It was the sort of country that bathed in a wild nature, unchecked by the razing hand of civilization. Plants, weeds, bushes, and flowers of every sight, sound, and description would shoot from the trunks, hang from the branches, grow out of the pontoons of the dock, and climb up the shallow cliffs at the lake’s edge.

Presently, it looked like the apocalypse. “Elmo,” the moniker her family had carved into an ancient pine twice as large as anything in the explored area, had fallen across the length of the cabin’s immediate clearing. Its corpse possessed of an almost merry fury, spiting sparks and smoke across the ground. The grass had managed to light in a few places, which led to flames lapping up the walls of the precisely carved and painted cabin, quaint if not for the modern touches, and also the furious heat spilling off of it. From one of the windows, little coughing sputterings of panic were coming in uneven wails. She took one look at the door, paused to steel her courage, and charged with all her might at the front door.

Flame-soaked wood had mostly scorched through by the time she had reached it, and with a pain-drenched bellow, her rubber-soled boot had driven itself into the door, crashing it open with a cacophonous rebound on the hollow inner wall. Within seconds of spilling into the threshold herself, the walls of the hallways began to groan. The sudden smashing of the door hadn’t had an ideal effect on the structural strength of the wall, and soon the entire cabin threatened to join the sadistic glee of the flames.

In the fore guest room, she had to push past a water-soaked blanket hanging from the doorway. Inside, she found two children huddled low to the ground. The youngest, a tiny child named Jessica, was huddled into a soaked through towel, sobbing in pained rasps between tears. The older, a preteen boy named Mark, was patting soothingly at the four-year-old’s hair and occasionally glancing nervously at the window. It had probably been his voice asking for help.

“Oh, thank the Gods you’re okay.” She said, reaching out. Mark spotted her, gathered up the young girl, and continued staying low to the ground, wisely keeping out of the smoke. The interior of the cabin was notably cooler, though still furiously hot by any other metric.

“Do you think the water’s still running?” She asked him, and he nodded.

She turned, offering a quick, “Stay here for just a second longer, and keep staying low.”

In the bathroom, it was decidedly hotter, but it seemed the back of the living area had fared worse in the fire than the front. Her initial touch to the bath tub’s faucet immediately scorched her hand, but she frowned with miserable determination, and cranked the spigot to full blast. The groan the piping system made was horrifying, and for a moment she was resigned to failure, but after a few more seconds of screaming, it finally spilled forth with probably the last gasps of cool water underground. She hurriedly threw open a nearby cabinet, soaked it in the quickly warming tub, and went back to the children’s bedroom.

“Do you know where the trail is?”

He nodded.

She thrust the oversized towel at him. “Wrap both of you in this, keep breathing into that towel she’s carrying. Stick to the trail, no matter what. It’s half a mile to the road, but I know you can make it. Run fast, but don’t breathe to hard. Use the towel. I’ll be right behind you.”

A moment of fear flickered through him, but her steely expression must have galvanized him enough to get him up. He took a corner of the towel, took a few deep breaths, and headed out of the room. “Front door!” She shouted after him.

Although she had always loved the hike, her stamina wasn’t built for running. And she had lied about the distance, it was closer to a mile than not. She let herself have a minute, on all fours in the clearing, clear of the worst of the flames, and huffed the air near to the dirt. But she knew if she gasped much longer, she wouldn’t be able to make it back, so she got up, willed as much steel into her spine as she could manage, and pelted into woods after the children.

The last mile was hell. She had neglected, in her exhaustion, to get a breathing rag for herself. Every churn of her legs burned her muscles, every moment in the scalding air burned her skin, and every ragged and labored breath fought her to be the last. She ignored the pain, and kept running. And kept running. And kept running.

Her mind drifted, as it usually did in her hikes, on how much she had once loved this trail. It was promise, a weekend full of adventure whose curves were familiar but promised new adventure. New joy. She was reasonably convinced had she not had such a firm knowledge of the trail, she would have lost it. And probably her life, out in the woods. She knew, in as much as her body screamed it’s fury at her, that the fire she felt was a good sign. That her nerves still worked. She panted her indignant rage at the fire, at the woods, and her spiteful joy that Mark and Jessica had actually made it out. She hadn’t seen them yet, and she wasn’t far from the road.

The last stretch was impossible. As she willed her legs to move, the stumbled, and she fell shoulder-first into the dirt. The twigs bit into her bare shoulder, the scraps of her flannel shirt dragged away when she fell. She had gashes up and down her legs, that hurled pain at her while she struggled to right herself. The last few meters felt like miles themselves, and she crawled as best she could. Everything hurt. Her eyes hurt so much. She was dizzy. Her fingertips felt impossibly pained, but also detached. Her fingernails dug into the dirt, and she hauled herself one handful forward at a time. Raking claw prints left a trail in the ashy mud, and her fingertips were beginning to scream as much as her eyes were. Her knees were likewise growling in howling fury. Her eyes blurred, colors began to wash out, and the last thing she remembered was a wash of colors, green and orange and white. An impossible luxury in the reds and blacks that had surrounded her for so long. Then, tired, in a pain she could never have imagined, she blinked and fought back sobs until she couldn’t think at all.

She awoke in white. Two figures in off-green blurs where bustling around, speaking quickly to one another. Something was pressed against her face, and it felt like it was crushing her jaw and skull. Her entire body hurt, and she had tears in her eyes. Distantly, she felt as if she was trying to scream, more in pain than anything else, but she made no noise. A distant pain registered on her arm, then she felt five small fingers press into her wrist. Then another five, firmer, larger, but still small. She tried to turn her focus on the smaller figures, hidden behind the blurs, but she knew Jessica and Mark were okay. She tried to smile at them, but her eyes closed.

They never reopened.

[orderofthewordlotus]

The soft stream of data flexed as I paced forward. It had gotten furiously colder as I delved deeper into The Machine. The walls glimmered faintly, painting aurora along the jagged edges of code. Flickers of light continued to dance in all directions, flickering through reality in uneven jolts of blue and white, before disappearing in either horizon.

My footsteps echoed as I walked, and the hallway seemed to lead eternally toward a glowing white.

The crystalline walls tightened and expanded in seemingly random intervals, as if breathing. At times, the corridor would tightening to an impossibly small space, crushing my body into tight and screaming formations. Mostly, the walls remained distant, gridlines bracketing the deep formations of light, and static bolts would lance along.

My path faltered for a fraction of a second, only the briefest fraction of a warning, and unmade reality tore through the floor and walls. Inky voids, pulsing with technicolor horrors, ripped reality asunder and began filling the corridor with heat and death. Almost as fast as they appeared, lightning would thrash from all directions, raking electricity across the soles of my feet, and impact on the growing voids. The edges of reality and unreality fought furiously, years of combat passing in fractions of a second. With finality, a box would appear over the void, matte blue-and-gray in contrast to the deep purples and blue of the cavernous grid. Then, a single bolt would arc into me, dancing up my leg, coiling around my abdomen, and shooting out of my fingertips, into the empty space in front of me. There, would sit a simple message, floating in the air without actual form, but masking the light of the corridor beyond it.

An unknown error has occurred. OK or Cancel

Tremors of electricity played out in my hand, fingers twitching erratically from the sudden onset of shocking fury The Machine sent do accomplish all of its tasks. I fought through the pain, and reached forward to press “OK.”

I had learned quickly that pressing “Cancel” was a mistake.

As if with a sigh of relief, the walls shrank back into the distance, and the message would disappear, leaving little motes of light to join the aurora, painting the corridor in little flickers of light.

And yet the corridor continued, deep and eternal, dragging me further into its depths as I walked. Unreality would occasionally peek through the walls between the streaks of lightning—greens, yellows, blues, reds—peering frenetically and curiously in all directions, before sinking back to nothingness before the next passing bolt shot by.

My feet ached with the passage of hundreds of shocks, my body pressed into the walls without warning, the ceiling groaned in metallic rage, and reality stuttered to a stop repeatedly. My journey continued unabated.

Burned, bruised, battered, and feet screaming incandescent rage, I reached a door. On it, a shield of blue of yellow in the place of a knob. I reached my hand forward, and lighting shot from the shield into me. My hand, arm, chest, and head all caught fire. Instantly, I slipped out of focus. It hurt, my nerves began to fail me, and I lost track of reality.

For a moment, all I could do was scream.

The pain receded, slowly, and I could open an eye. The edges of the text were still blurry, and colors were far too bright, but at length I managed to read the message that had, at some point, appeared.

You need administrative permission to open this folder. Allow Access

My arm failed me. I laid there, shoulders burning, back aching, fingertips roaring in pain, as the walls pulsed close and tight. At length, I realized I was crumpled on the floor, legs given out. My neck felt twisted, and I couldn’t get it to move. I tried anyway. My back continued to ache. Distance glimmers of pain, too small to be of any consequence, would register on my back, arms, and legs. My feet twitched occasionally, and the message remained. Glowing in place. Hovering eternally.

The hallways had grown hotter, I could feel sweat accumulating in my armor. The weapons had scattered across the floor at some point, I could see the soft orange glow against the crystals to my left. The message loomed. My fingers twitched when I willed them to, but couldn’t really move.

The walls, though somewhat random, had loose patterns they adhered to. The grid, where the crystals had not jammed through, pulsed in time with the breathing. The lightning that danced across the walls seemed to come in waves, and as I stared beyond the surface orange, the subsurface blues, and deep within, I could see layers and layers and layers of lightning, all lancing through. A constant stream of data to and from whatever was beyond the message.

I watched it all happen for time, longer than I remember but shorter than it probably was. The longer I watched, the more comfortable I realized I’d become. My neck had moved out of its strained twist, I had sat up at some point, and with my feet under me, the passing bolts through had stopped burning, and instead, glanced around me. I took a deep breath, fogging the inside of my helmet, and fought to raise a finger.

I am not proud of the noises I made.

But I pressed “Allow,” and the door opened.

Before me, a single jutting path leading up to the center of a cavernous expanse. In the near edges, crystals danced along the pulsing of the gridwork. I stood, sobs escaping my lips as I retrieved my weapons, and strode forward.

A Blue Window stood before me, flickering ominously into the darkness. Tendrils of light trails drifted below, like motes of its very form, holding it aloft in the empty air before me.

All at once, the Window tripled in size, the entire cavern screamed, messages shot out in all directions, surrounding me, and I dropped into a fighting crouch.

The Machine had woken.

XP/98 remix

[orderofthewordlotus]

I shuffle my heel against the gravel, and gesture furiously forward. “Oh, of course his sword is on fire. Why wouldn’t the sword be on fire. This hardly seems fair.”

The man next to me, a frazzled looking officer in blue polyester and cheap slacks, stands his ground. The dust of the parking lot whips between us and the musclebound lunatic opposite us. His sword shimmers in the air, heat vibrating the air anxiously around the naked steel of his sword. His expression flickers with unstable emotion, eyelid twitching in excitement, smile lurching frenetically between abject joy and gleeful impatience. I flick my wrist vaguely in the attacker’s direction, muzzle of my Glock mostly mostly pointed toward the ground. “Can you seriously believe this? I swear... This city gets more absurd by the hour. What’s next, a bow and arrow?”

The officer next to me turns, left eye veiled with a gradient of blues and yellows, right eye goggling through the empty frame of his aviators. “Are you kidding me right now? Are you seriously mouthing off while a guy with a burning sword is threatening us?”

I shift my weight to my opposite leg, left hand painting oblique shapes in the sky. “I mean, he’s probably going to try to stab us regardless of what we say. Why not make fun of the fact that this person is about ten years too late to post himself on DeviantArt with a caption like ‘While you were out drinking coffee, I was studying the blade.’?”

“Because he already looks like he wants to stab you first, and if he does, I’m screwed?”

“Look, it’s not my fault you dropped your gun, and baton, and handcuffs, and pepper spray while we were fighting the non-Musical cast of Grease.”

The man on the far side of the gravel lot started to lurch forward, and I held up an impatient finger in his direction, still not averting my gaze from the officer. Out of either surprise or confusion, the mugger’s roll forward skidded to a halt. I continued, still gesturing into the dust with my gun.

“Besides, you still have your taser. Just don’t miss.”

His one eye glared at me. “Yeah, and get my ID-laden confetti everywhere? I hate that paperwork.”

“Downtown is currently under attack by a lizard-esque allegory for nuclear weapons. The arts district has been taken over by mutant baristas. I still don’t know where all the clowns in the Department of Tourism came from, much less all the 1800s Daimler-Motor Carraiges. If you really think they’re going to hold you to departmental paperwork in triplicate while the world is currently on fire, you’re in dire need of cashing this reality check I’m about to write you.”

The thug started to move again, but I threw a glare in his direction and grunted in the negative the way I would an unruly dog. He stopped again, and turned his unstable glare at me. The confusion must have been catching up with him, because he started bubbling with uneven, arhythmic laughter. There was a bit of manic energy to the darting of his pupils that I noted before turning back to the officer.

“Besides, beyond anything else, I think an suspect charging you with a bladed weapon is exactly the sort of situation that requires an escalation of force. I can’t imagine you wouldn’t have been trained to open fire on someone charging at you with a sword, much less one tha-”

In the middle of my monologue, the lanky man began screaming, raised his katana, and started his charge across the lot. The officer jerked his head over to the attacker. My gun raised, more on instinct that intentional thought, and I fired six shots. Two must have missed, the third hit his left knee, the fourth splintered a piece of brick off of the nearby deli, and the fifth and sixth hit his gut and right elbow respectively. Still in mid-charge but without enough stable bone to continue holding his weapon or balance, he fell crushingly into the gravel. I saw the officer wince as the attacker rolled and scraped down the gravel briefly before ending in a crumpled, scraped, blood-soaked mess right behind a now-splattered Range Rover.

“-that’s clearly generating magical fire. Now can you stop worrying so much and help me get to the children’s hospital on 47th and Earnest? It’s getting late, and at this rate, I’m going to run out of ammo before I can make contact with my client.”

The officer, visibly shaken, continues to shiver in place. Walk over, grab the attacker’s sword from the ground, blade still glowing faintly orange in the thinnest points, and jam the blade into the thug’s back with my whole body weight, hopefully driving the chisel into the dirt. The thug makes a sickening wheezing sound, and I kick him as hard as I can in the temple to ease him from consciously bleeding to death in a paid parking lot. I grimace at the sound his head makes against my boot, but it feels less sick than just letting him bleed to death stapled to a $6.50 an hour parking space. The officer just stares at me, aghast.

I frown at him, “I know... C’mon, we need to get going. There’s probably a hoard of winged monkeys in the park at Leopold St, and the ash cloud is growing darker.”

The officer falls into step beside me, and I try to think of more jokes. Anything to keep focusing on the steadily growing murder count for today’s contract alone. The wind haunts my mind as it whips through the plastic tarp thrashing furiously from the broken skyscraper windows overhead.

“Seems like a long shot,” I ask the growing darkness of the afternoon, “but do you think the 7-11 is still open in the apocalypse?”

The officer looks mortified at me, but the faintest ghost of a smile crosses the corner of his lips. Good enough for now. Maybe I’ll be able to sleep with myself tonight.