"Mission accomplished. The survival rate was 4% and valuable human resources were lost, but that is war. The mission objective takes priority over everything else. Holding to that principle is why I have never failed a mission. The Death cannot die…"
Very little is known of the Umbrella Security Service's best agent, save for his codename: HUNK. With a track record of being the sole survivor of dangerous operations, he’s earned the illustrious nickname The Grim Reaper(sometimes mistranslated to Mr. Death or The Death). The Raccoon City incident wasn’t much different, as HUNK was the only survivor of a mutated Birkin’s rampage and barely made it out alive. Always professional, HUNK didn’t let a little thing like a sewer and police station full of assorted B.O.W.s or the threat of a nuke keep him from completing his objective with a cool head.
Note: Since HUNK has one notable canon appearance done multiple times (The 4th Survivor scenario in both versions of Resident Evil 2, as well as Umbrella Chronicles) and half his existence is bonus modes like Mercenaries (RE4 and 3D) and Raid Mode (The Revelations games), this thread’s gonna involve some definitely noncanonical stuff, including Operation Raccoon City. Hover over feats to see what they're from.
Physicals:
Strength:

• Destroys a zombie's head with a stomp.
  
• Knocks back an attacking zombie with a spin kick before snapping its neck.
  
• HUNK loves snapping necks.
  
• Can launch several enemies with a kick.
  
• Splatters grappling Ganados heads with a kick or elbow to escape grabs.
  
• Kicks a door open, knocking over enemies on the other side.
  
• Can launch foes with elbow strikes.
  
• Stabs up through a zombie's head with his wrist blade before kicking them away.
  
• Kills a zombie with a backstab and twist.
  
• Can launch foes back with a thrust of his wrist blades.
  
• Can bust crates.
  
• Kicks open the gates of the police department.
  

Durability:

• Some time after Birkin attacked his squad, killing most of them with a strike, HUNK wakes up facedown in water no worse for wear.
  
• Fine next to an exploding car.
  
• Can get knocked over by a Ganado's shield bash but kips back up.
  
• Can take flaming arrows.
  
• Can take slashes from Garradors. Garradors can destroy a big metal bell and embed their claws in a stone wall with their strikes.
  
• Knocked down by an explosion but gets back up.
  
• Can recover from his own proximity mine going off.
  
• Sent flying by a strike from a pipe wielding mutated Birkin, though he recovers soon afterwards. Birkin can bring down a concrete wall.
  
• Thrown by Birkin after the BOW smashes through some metal security doors. When HUNK reunites with Delta Squad a little later, he's fine.
  
• Can get set on fire without much issue.
  
• Can take strikes from Mr. X. Mr. X is pretty strong.
  
  • Full Mr. X RT here just to be safe.
• Can take bites to neck and leg from zombies and shake them off.
  

Speed/Agility:

• Shoots two Hunters to death as they lunge at him, then dodges an Ivy’s attack before killing it.
  
• Jumps over a counter.
  
• Can shoot arrows out of the air.
  
• Leaps through a window like a cool dude.
  
• Flips to his feet after getting knocked down.
  
• Can pull off a spin kick in his combat gear.
  
• HUNK's iconic backflip.
  
• Umbrella Corps mercs can scale walls easily with their gear.
  

Skill:

• Headshots two Hunters at close range as they lunge at him.
  
• Forget double tapping, HUNK triple taps downed foes. Here's another example if you're tired of looking at the 3DS game.
  
• Quickly takes out two guards in close quarters with a knife to the chest and a neck snap.
  
• Takes out a guard's leg for an easy throat slit.
  
• Invented CQBZ (Close Quarters Quarantined Battle Zone), a combat style adopted by Umbrella Corps mercenaries. Here's some counterattacks involving avoiding strikes, a few funny little slides, gratuitous stabbing, and of course a neck snap.
  
• Will cram a grenade in your mouth, if he must.
  

Misc:

• Ate Tofu.
  
• Despite earlier showings having him pretty callous about his squad's lives, later games have HUNK show some concern for people under his command.
  
  • In a report to Alfred Ashford, complains about information being withheld from his squad and putting them at risk.
  • Gives Delta Squad advice mid combat.
  • Chews out a squadmate for killing Birkin despite their orders, but covers for him when it's time to report.
  • Orders Nighthawk to leave him behind when HUNK is unable to reach the extraction point. Lucky for him that's not an order Nighthawk follows.

Weapons/Gear: The Umbrella Corps gear isn't being used by HUNK, but was supposedly developed by him so I feel it's worth noting.
Blades:

• A combat knife.
  
• Retractable wrist blades.
  
• Seems to have a retractable blade built into his boots.
  
  • Here's HUNK showing off his hidden blades in his Reaper costume.
• The Brainer, a specialized ice axe made for zombie combat. The Brainer's blade can become heated, being hot enough to cut/burn through an Umbrella Corps Bite Guard/arm and helmeted head.
  

Firearms:

• In the on rails shooters, gunfire from any weapon is able to destroy environmental objects. This ranges from smashing through locked doors and busting a dresser to making cars explode or even busting the statue in the main hall of the Police Department.
  
• Custom TMP: A modified SMG.
  
• AK-74: An assault rifle.
  
• H&K P8: HUNK's 3DS sidearm.
  
• MUP: The standard 9mm handgun.
  
• Lightning Hawk: The trusty magnum, great for popping heads.
  
• LE5: Totally not an MP5, guys.
  
• W-870: A pump shotgun.
  

Explosives:

• Hand grenades
  
• Incendiary grenades
  
• Flashbangs in both throwable and launcher forms. These can instakill Ganados Plagas, super parasites which are sensitive to UV light.
  
• Proximity mines.
  

Special Gear:

• Active Camouflage: HUNK can briefly become invisible. HUNK can deactivate it at will, but the camo will also break if he attacks or takes damage.
  
  • The camo returns in Raid Mode, oddly enough.
• The Bite Guard: An arm guard that extends into a small shield that can deflect incoming gunfire. Couldn't find much footage showing it off clearly, so here's the promo poster featuring a bullet deflect. It's coated in a resin that sticks to zombies, preventing them from getting closer while making them into temporary meat shields.
  
• Terrain Spikes: Umbrella Corps boots basically have built in crampons good for climbing and zombie stomping.
  
• Zombie Jammer: This back mounted device generates an electromagnetic field that disorients zombies. While it's active you can even bump into them without provoking them. Of course, if the device is destroyed the horde will notice you.
  

“This is war, survival’s your responsibility.”

I made the first part of this weeks ago, sorry for the delay.
Indiana: One of the more surprising retirement announcements so far has been that of first-term Senator Mike Braun, who is leaving Washington for a crack at his state's governorship. And he seems to be the early favorite, although he hasn't cleared the field by any means. With her boss term-limited, Lt Governor Suzanne Crouch is gunning for a promotion, and already has the support of two representatives- one of them Greg Pence, the older brother of the former vice president. Former Representative Trey Hollingsworth, who retired from his South Indiana House seat last year, is also considering a run. On the Democratic side, I'm getting a bit of deja vu from Oklahoma- former Republican State Superintendent Jennifer McCormick has switched parties and is now seeking the Democratic nomination (although unlike Joy Hoffmeister, she has been less public about her reasoning for changing parties). And if either Evan Bayh or Joe Donnelly want to stage a political comeback, this might be their last chance for a while. None of the candidates so far are standouts, so Safe R, although the entrance of one of the former senators could make it interesting.
West Virginia: With party-switching incumbent Jim Justice termed out and running for Senate, the top job in the Mountain State is up for grabs. The Republican primary is getting interesting. Politics is often a family business in West Virginia, and that's on full display here with the sons of both Sen. Shelley Moore Capito and Rep. Carol Miller jumping in. Three statewide officials have also joined the race- state auditor JB McCluskey, Attorney General Pat Morrisey (who lost to Joe Manchin in 2018), and Secretary of State Mac Warner. (Sidenote on the family thing- Mac Warner's three brothers all have their own political careers. Kasey was a US Attorney, Kris chaired the WV GOP, and Monty ran for governor in 2004.) Ex-Representatives David McKinley and Evan Jenkins are also reportedly considering bids. On the Democratic side, Joe Manchin has ruled out the possibility of a return to his old job. The top contenders so far are Huntingdon mayor Steve Williams and 2020 nominee Ben Salango, the worst-performing Democratic governor nominee in state history. The only way I can see Democrats being remotely competitive is if they convince Richard Ojeda to run, and even then, whoever emerges from the messy Republican primary is pretty likely to win. Safe R.
North Carolina: This will be short, as this race is the most discussed. For good reason, too- it's the only swing state here. Incumbent Democrat Roy Cooper is term-limited, and the Democrats have all lined up behind AG Josh Stein, Cooper's protegee and successor in that role. Meanwhile, the Republican frontrunner is Lt Gov Mark Robinson, a... controversial figure known for his conspiratorial beliefs about the pandemic and some truly vile statements regarding LGBT people. He's also made some statements suggesting he believes in a Jewish cabal controlling the world. However, the NC Republicans aren't all sold on him. He's facing a challenge from Treasurer Dale Folwell and ex-Rep Mark Walker. Stein is a solid recruit, Robinson has some huge liabilities from his past statements, so this race will probably be bluer than the presidential race, which is already going to be close. Lean D.
Delaware: 2024 is looking to be a major shakeup for Delaware politics, with Gov John Carney term limited and Sen Tom Carper retiring. Carper has endorsed the state's lone Representative, Lisa Blunt Rochester, to take his seat. Assuming she takes the offer, and she has no reason not to, that means an open Senate seat, House seat, and governorship. Matt Meyer, the executive of New Castle County (which holds a majority of the state's population), is probably going to run. Meyer has governed as a progressive, raising the minimum wage for public employees to 15 dollars an hour, making New Castle County a sanctuary county for immigrants, and getting into fights with police unions. Lt Gov Bethany Hall-Long and AG Kathy Jennings are possible alternatives, probably getting support from Delaware's establishment. On the Republican side, there is basically no bench there. It's probably going to be some no-name state legislator or local official. Safe D.
Vermont: Everything in this race hinges on whether or not Phil Scott runs for a fifth term. He's been in office for eight years, and despite being a Republican in the nation's bluest state in a time of increasing partisanship, he keeps winning by larger and larger margins. Last year, he swept every municipality in the state, and I'm not sure how long it's been since that happened. If he's in for another two years, he'll face only token opposition and cruise to reelection. If he retires, then his party will have a tough time finding a replacement. I don't think it'd be impossible for a non-Scott Republican to hold the seat, but it would be difficult. Republicans would be smart to find a successor before Scott retires- possibly Christina Nolan? Meanwhile, the Democrats could very well see a battle royale amongst the other statewide executive positions- one in which the endorsements of Bernie Sanders, Pat Leahy, and Peter Welch would probably prove decisive. Safe R if Scott runs, Safe D if he doesn't.
New Hampshire: Similarly to its western neighbor, popular Gov Chris Sununu's decision to run for another term or to retire will determine everything else about it. While Sununu's popularity seems to have peaked in 2020, with the Republican legislative majorities that came off his coattails that year forcing him to take more decisive stands on controversial issues, he's still very well liked and would easily win another term if he so chose. If not, a variety of politicians will probably throw their hats into the ring. Senate President Chuck Morse has said that he'll run if Sununu doesn't, although former Sen Kelly Ayotte and 2022 Senate nominee Don Bolduc have also been suggested as candidates. Meanwhile, the Democrats are probably going to run Manchester mayor Joyce Craig regardless of Sununu's decision, although if he retires others might join the fray for an actual chance to win the governorship. Oh, and the state legislature probably flips next year. Safe R if Sununu runs, lean D if he doesn't.
Washington: Yeah, I kinda have to redo this one after Jay Inslee announced his retirement. Two statewide officials have entered the race already, AG Bob Ferguson and Commissioner of Public Lands Hillary Franz. Ferguson's endorsement list is a veritable who's who of Washington politicians, so he's got the inside track for a spot on the November ballot. Who he'll end up facing depends on how many other people join in- if no other notable Democrats run, Franz has a decent shot at the #2 slot, while if the Republicans unite behind a single candidate, they reach the second round. Either way, Ferguson probably wins (seriously, look at this list). Safe D, >1/3 shot of a double Dem November ballot.
Yeah okay, maybe people don't talk much about these races because most of the drama is between state-level politicians nobody outside the state has heard of, and it's all in the primaries.

Name Subject Object Determiner Pronoun Reflexive he/him he him his his himself she/her she her hers hers herself ae/aer ae aer aer aers aerself ay/em ey em eir eirs emself fae/faer fae faer faer faers faerself xe/xem xe xem xyr xyrs xemself ze/hir ze hir hir hirs hirself ze/zir ze zir zir zirs zirself co/cos co co cos co's coself e/em e em eir eirs emself e/em/es e em es ems emself hu/hum hu hum hus hus huself ne/nem ne nem nir nirs nemself ne/nir ne nir nir nirs nirself peper per per per pers perself s/he s/he hir hir hirs hirself thon/thons thon thon thons thon's thonself ve/ver ve ver vis vers verself vi/ver vi ver vis virs verself vi/vim vi vim vis vims vimself zhe/zher zhe zher zher zhers zherself bun/bun bun bun buns buns bunself tei/ter tei ter ter ters terself e/hem e hem hes hes hemself they/them they them theirs theirs theirself eero er ero eros eros eroself thou/thee thou thee thy thine thyself pi/pika pi pika pika pikas piself fai/fairy fai fairy fair fairys fairyself Hy/hym Hy hym hys Hys Hymself Poison/Poison Poison Poison Poisons Poisons Poisonself CeCerise Cer Cerise Cerise Cerises Ceriseself mao/mao mao mao maos maos maoself mrmrrp mrr mrrp mrrps mrrps mrrpself pittepatter pitter patter pitters patters pitterself deity/deity deity deity deitys deitys deityself xey/xem xey xem xyr xyrs xemself hy/hyp hy hyp hyper hypers hypself Honk/Honk Honk Honk honks honks Honkself puppy/puppy puppy puppy pups pups pupself cloud/cloud cloud cloud clouds clouds cloudself bat/bat bat bat bats bats batself fox/fox fox fox foxs foxs foxself nya/nyan nya nyan nyans nyans nyanself kitty/kitty kitty kitty kittys kittys kitself pup/purr pup purr pups pups purrself stastar star star stars stars starself Pup/Pup Pup Pup Pups Pups Pupself zhe/her zhe her her herz herzelf ro/rose ro rose roses roses roseself Dex/Dex Dex Dex dexz dexz Dexself Gi/Gir Gi Gir Gir girs Girself Be/Berry Be Berry berrys Berrys Berryself Ci/Cipher Ci Cipher ciphers ciphers Cipherself Deu/Deu Deu Deu Deus deus Deuself SeSera Ser Sera Seras seras Seraphself in/indo in indo indols indols indolentself slo/sloth slo sloth sloths sloths slothself a/arro a arro arrogas arrogas arrogantself pri/pride pri pride prides prides prideself glu/glutto glu glutto gluttony gluttonys gluttonyself vo/vor vo vor voraci voracis voraciousself wra/wrath wra wrath wraths wraths wrathself fu/fury fu fury furio furious furiouself en/envy en envy envys envys envyself je/jeal je jeal jeal jealous jealouself lu/lust lu lust lusts lusts lustself rep/tile rep tile reps reps reptileself lasci/lasciv lasci lasciv lascivious lascivious lasciviouself gre/greed gre greed greed greeds greedself li/liz li liz lizards lizards lizardself abey/abem abey abem abir abirs abemself aby/abm aby abm abeir abeirs abmself yo/yom yo yom yor yors yomself jun/junt jun junt juntos juntos juntoself mach/machi mach machi machin machines machineself ca/care ca care cares cares careself bea/beam bea beam beams beams beamself Mura/Murasa Mura Murasa Muras Muras Murasakinoself vjo/vjol vjo vjol vjolas vjolas vjolaself ro/rox ro rox roxos roxos roxoself lanu/viole lanu viole lanus violes lanu violeself phe/phere phe phere pher phers phereseself Fia/Fialo Fia Fialo Fialovs Fialovs Fialováself wun/wung wun wung wungus wungus wunguself zamb/zamba zamb zamba zambar zambars zambarauself li/lil li lil lilas lilas lilaself momor mor mor mors mors morself siyo/siyoh siyo siyoh siyohr siyohrs siyohrangself pofor por for porffors porffors porfforself mfu/mfus mfu mfus mfusas mfusas mfusaself el/eles el eles eleses eleses eleseself ons/onsom ons onsom onsomis onsomis onsomiself shi/shiy shi shiy shiyas shiyas shiyaself kwa/kwam kwa kwam kwamis kwamis kwamiself tic/tic tic tic tics tics ticself toutoure tour toure tourettes tourettes touretteself Knu/Knul Knu Knul Knullas Knullas Knullaself Vio/Viole Vio Viole Violetti Violettis Violettiself cotton/candy cotton candy candies candies cottonself ly/lyc ly lyc lycans lycans lycanself bite/bite bite bite bites bites biteself pop/bop pop bop bops pops bopself vi/vik vi vik vikins viking vikingself chem/chemic chem chemic chemical chemicals chemicself t/t t t t's t's tself iv/iv iv iv ivs ivs ivself z/z z z z's z's zself se/hir se hir hir hirs hirself phi/phim phi phim phir phirs phirself ye/yem ye yem yer yers yemself we/wem we wem wer wers wemself ve/vem ve vem ver vers vemself ue/uem ue uem uer uers uemself te/tem te tem ter ters temself se/sem se sem ser sers semself re/rem re rem rer rers remself qe/qem qe qem qer qers qemself pe/pem pe pem per pers pemself oe/oem oe oem oer oers oemself de/dem de dem demo demos demoself fi/fien fi fien fiend fiends fiendself de/dim de dim dis dis dimself eel/eel eel eel eels eels eelself lamprey/lamprey lamprey lamprey lampreys lampreys lampreyself fae/faen fae faen faer faers faenself fla/flae fla flae flaem flaes flaeself exe/exe exe exe exe exes txtself nyc/nycto nyc nycto nyctos nyctos nyctoself cry/cryp cry cryp crys crys crypself me/mem me mem mer mers memself le/lem le lem ler lers lemself ke/kem ke kem ker kers kemself je/jem je jem jer jers jemself ie/iem ie iem ier iers iemself he/hem he hem her hers hemself ge/gem ge gem ger gers gemself fe/fem fe fem fer fers femself ee/eem ee eem eer eers eemself ce/cem ce cem cer cers cemself Be/Bem Be Bem Bir Birs Bemself Ae/Aem Ae Aem Aeir Aeirs Aemself bri/brigh bri brigh brigh brighs brightself Kie/Kym Kie Kym Kir Kirs Kymself Nie/Nym Nie Nym Nyr Nyrs Nymself Sie/Sym Sie Sym Ser Sers Symself Xe/Xym Xe Xym Xyr Xyrs Xymself Mie/Mim Mie Mim Mir Mirs Mimself idol/idol idol idol idols idols idolself ce/cer ce cer cem cers cerself 3/3 3 3 3s 3s 3self vi/vir vi vir virus virus viruself han/ham han ham hans hans han selv king/king king king kings king's kingself ix/ix ix ix ixs ixs ixself sly/slim sly slim sleir sleirs slimself sli/slime sli slime slimes slimes slimeself sly/sly sly sly sly’s sly’s slyself doll/doll doll doll doll’s doll’s dollself xe/xet xe xet xet xets xetself ith/ith ith ith iths iths ithself baby/baby baby baby baby's baby's babyself Miku/Miku Miku Miku Mikur Mikurs Mikuself wol/wolf wol wolf wolf wolfs wolfself hohorse hor horse horse horses horseself boom/boomer boom boomer booms boomers boomerself go/goth go goth goths goths gothself vivirg vir virg vir virgs virgoself le/les le les lesb lesbians lesbianself catboy/catboy catboy catboy catboys catboys catboyself radio/radium radio radium radios radioactives radioactiveself cacaru car caru cariad cariads cariadself ef/fe ef fe ei ei ei hun angel/angel angel angel angels angels angelself Ze/zim Ze zim zir zirs zimself mi/mim mi mim mimicks mimicks mimickself you/you you you your yours yourself hx/hxm hx hxm hxs hxs hxmself bug/bug bug bug bugs bugs bugself pocket/pocket pocket pocket pockets pockets pocketself li/lim li lim liz liz lizelf h/hm h* hm hs hs hmself dae/daem dae daem daer daer daemself Xe/Xim Xe Xim Xe's Xis Ximself fla/flare fla flare flares flares flareself spark/spark spark spark sparks sparks sparkself lul/lul lul lul lulz lulz lulself were/were were were wolf wolfs wereself Medi/Medical Medi Medical Medical Medicals Mediself ai/ai ai ai ais ais aisself mi/mis mi mis mis mist mistself Fa/Faun Fa Faun Faun Fauns Faunself py/pyl py pyl pylx pylx pylxself tee/tee tee tee tees tees teeself fe/fea fe fea feas feas featherself coo/coo coo coo coos coos cooself zi/zip zi zip zips zipps zipperself cryp/crypt cryp crypt crypt cryptis cryptidself pey/pen pey pen pens pens penself ce/cev ce cev cevs cevs cevself se/sev se sev sevs sevs sevenself the/then the then thens thens thenself Ze/Zer Ze Zer Zer Zers Zeroself Brai/Brain Brai Brain Brains Brains Brainself leo/leo leo leo leos leos leoself Ti/Tiel Ti Tiel Tiels Tiels Tielself Chi/Chit Chi Chit Chits Chits Chitterself ciph/ciph ciph ciph ciphs ciphs cipherself dae/daer dae daer daer daers daerselr ciph/cipher ciph cipher ciphz ciphz cipherself moon/moon moon moon moons moons moonself mew/mew mew mew mews mews mewself sno/snow sno snow snows snows snowself pos/sum pos sum poss summ possumself meow/meow meow meow meows meows meowself nyan/nyan nyan nyan nyans nyans nyanself 0/0 0 0 0s 0s 0self lin/linen lin linen linens linens linenself xe/xen xe xen xeno xenos xenoself li/lum li lum lumi lumis lumiself zie/zier zie zier zier ziers zierself Abyss/Abyss Abyss Abyss Abyssal Abyssals Abysself rulerule ruler rule rulers rulers rulerself zie/vaer zie vaer vaer vaers vaerself yo/yor yo yor yors yors yordleself glock/glocken glock glocken glockenspiels glockenspiels glockself wick/wick wick wick wicks wicks wickself 3rr03rr0r 3rr0r 3rr0r 3rr0rs 3rr0rs 3rr0r$3lf 90/90 90 90 90r 90s 9self0 ehs/reh ehs reh reh sreh flesreh eh/mih eh mih sih sih flesmih yeht/meht yeht meht rieht srieht flemeht poppy/seed poppy seed poppyseeds poppys poppyseedself poppyseed/poppyseed poppyseed poppyseed poppyseeds poppyseeds poppyseedself of/of of of ofs ofs ofself choke/choke choke choke choke chokes chokeself mon/ster mon ster monsters monsters monstelf that thing/it that thing it its that thing's itself obje/ctum obje ctum objectum objectums objectuself xhee/xhim xhee xhim xhir xheis xeeself stim/stim stim stim stims stims stimself price/princes price princes prince’s prince’s princeself ze/zem ze zem zer zers zemself k9/k9 k9 k9 k9s k9s k9self co/co co co cos cos coself ne/nym ne nym nir nir nymself shae/shade shae shade shade shades shadeself aw/warm aw warm warms warms warmself lea/leaf lea leaf leaves leafs leafself shey/shem shey shem sheir sheirs shemself hal/hallo hal hallo hallos hallos halloweenself pu/pum pu pum pums pums pumpkinself Xi/Xem Xi Xem Xer Xers Ximself lux/lucif lux lucif lucifs lucifs luxself h3/h1m h3 h1m h15 h15 h1553lf raw beef/raw beef raw beef raw beef raw beef’s raw beef’s raw beef’sself e/e e e e e e N/N N N Ns N's Nself bun/bun bun bun bun’s bun’s bunself Che/Chev Che Chev Chevs Chevs Chevself anti/anti anti anti antis antis antiself Witch/Witch's Witch Witch's Witch's Witches Witchself cocorpse cor corpse corpse corpses corpself ang/angel ang angel anges angels angelself 6/6 6 6 6s 6s 6self ne/nim ne nim nier niers nierself ci/her ci her her hers herself v/v v v vs vs vself vee/vee vee vee vees vees veeself pen/pent pen pent pentas pentas pentagramself hann/hans hann hans hánum sín hann ci/cir ci cir cir cirs cirself auti/auti auti auti autis autis autiself ci/hir ci hir hir hirs hirself dae/dem dae dem deir deirs demself fufren fur fren friends friends friendself zi/zim zi zim ziz ziz zizelf pika/pika pika pika pikas pikas pikaself Dey/Dem Dey Dem Der Ders Demself Sh3/H3r Sh3 H3r H3r H3rs H3rself 9/9 9 9 9s 9's 9self Drop/Drip Drop Drip Drops Drips Dropself note/note note note notes notes noteself ghost/ghost ghost ghost ghost ghosts ghostself Co/Coin Co Coin Coins Coins Coinself wing/wing wing wing wings wings wingself fin/fin fin fin fins fins finself ceph/cephalopod ceph cephalopod cephas cephas cephaself squid/squid squid squid squids squids squidself eye strain/eye strain eye strain eye strain eye strains eye strains eye strains self thy/thm thy thm thir thirs thmself plu/plur plu plur plural plurals pluralself sy/sys sy sys sys systems systemself ti/mul ti mul multi multis multiself ti/multi ti multi multi multis multiself rad/radi rad radi radis radis radiself Sae/Saer Sae Saer Saers Saers Saerself Sae/Sae Sae Sae Saer Saer Saerself 7/7 7 7 7s 7s 7self ei/eim ei eim heir heirs heimself zhey/zhem zhey zhem zheir zheirs zhemself hug/hug hug hug hugs hugs hugself bey/bem bey bem beir beirs beeself that/that that that it's it's itself vae/vaem vae vaem vaeir vaeirs vaemself th3y/th3m th3y th3m th31r th31rz th31mz53lf cub/cub cub cub cubs cubs cubself lolord lor lord lords lords lordself cocorps cor corps corpses corpses corpself bon/bone bon bone bone bones boneself sal/sal sal sal sals sals salself bin/binn bin binn binns binns binnselph prox/proxi prox proxi proxis proxis proxiser an/anim an anim animal animals animalself nine/nine nine nine nine nines nineself ae/aeth ae aeth aethe aethes aeself ti/ger ti ger tigers tigers tigerself a/aro a aro aro aros aroself a/ace a ace aces aces aceself vi/vil vi vil vila vilas villainself di/div di div divis divis divineself cie/cir cie cir cir cirs cirself Mage/Magi Mage Magi Mages Mages Mageself she/hyr she hyr hyr hyrz hyrzelf z3/z1m z3 z1m z1r z1rz z1rzelf azu/azur azu azur azur azurs azurself fool/fool fool fool fools fools foolself che/chem che chem chems chems chemiself gho/ghost gho ghost ghost ghosts ghostself min/mino min mino mino mino minself mush/mushs mush mushs mushs mushs mushself diz/dizs diz dizs dizs dizs dizself sun/suns sun suns suns suns sunself sun/sun sun sun suns suns sunself heiheir heir heir heir heirs heirself multiple/multiple multiple multiple multiples multiples multipleself bork/bork bork bork bark barks barkself bork/borks bork borks bark barks borkself mad/mad mad mad mads mads madself 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kemself ve/vym ve vym vyr vyrs vymself dea/deam dea deam deas deams deaself gol/gold gol gold golds golds goldself pluplur plur plur plurs plurs plurself hi/hem hi hem hes hes hemself ci/cen ci cen cen cens cenself en/en en en ens ens enself sol/sol sol sol sols sols solself hey/hem hey hem heir heirs hemself vie/vyr vie vyr vem vers vemself ve/vim ve vim vis vis vimself thone/thone thone thone thones thones thoneself caet/caet caet caet caets caets caetself cae/caem cae caem caer caers caemself cae/caer cae caer caer caers caerself vae/vaer vae vaer vaer vaers vaerself Ci/Cem Ci Cem Cen Cens Cenself one/one one one one's one's oneself eth/eth eth eth eths eths ethself cele/cele cele cele celes celes celeself Vul/Vulp Vul Vulp Vulps Vulps Vulpself xie/xer xie xer xer xers xerself fey/feym fey feym feir feirs feirself kit/kit kit kit kits kits kitself si/hyr si hyr hyr hyrs hyrself zie/hir zie hir hir hirs hirself zee/zed zee zed zeta zetas zedself zme/zmyr zme zmyr zmyr zmyrs zmyrself se/sim se sim ser sers serself ze/mer ze mer zer zers zemself zie/zem zie zem zes zes zirself zie/zir zie zir zir zirs zirself jee/jem jee jem jeir jeirs jemself peh/pehm peh pehm peh's peh's pehself sie/hir sie hir hir hirs hirself thon/thon thon thon thons thons thonself ip/ip ip ip ips ips

Hey there! Today I am looking for a role set in the world of Westeros. I would like to play AUs where some seemingly small changes cause the story to change completely. I am also open to hearing your ideas as well, even outside the fandom. My ideas are: Jon/Dany (AU): After the Red Wedding, Jon flees the watch and Westeros as a whole. He goes to Mereen and finds Daenerys, and eventually he makes her give him control of her, her armies, and her dragons, and he leads the invasion himself to reclaim the Iron Throne Jon/Dany (After show): After Bran's ascension to the throne, Jon retires North of the Wall, ready to find a new life of leading the Free Folk. However, before he can, Dany and Drogon return to Westeros to demand his help deposing Bran as he's become a tyrant as the Three Eyed Raven Robb/Daenerys: Two options for this one, depending on how you want your Dany to be. Either: Dany arrives to Westeros after Drogo's death, with three newborn dragons and her Dothraki handmaidens, to stay at Winterfell under Ned Stark's protection, on the condition that she must marry Robb in exchange and become lady of Winterfell Dany arrives to Westeros after the events in Mereen, with three full grown dragons, a Dothraki horde, an Unsullied army, and her alliances with Dorne, the Reach and the Iron Islands, ready to take back her father's throne. Ned, seeing the writing on the wall for his friend, offers her his allegiance on the condition she marries Robb and takes him as King Consort Robb/Myrcella: When king Robert rides to Winterfell to ask Ned to become Hand of the King, and offers a union between Joffrey and Sansa, Ned tells him Sansa is already promised to Domeric Bolton, and instead offers to marry his heir Robb to his daughter Myrcella Jon/Sansa (AU): In an alternate timeline where Rhaegar deposed the Mad King and married Lyanna Stark, Jon Snow is raised Jaeherys Targaryen in King's Landing. When Ned Stark rides to visit his siter, the crown prince meets his cousin Sansa Stark, and the two are quickly entangled in a lustful affair that will bring headaches to both their Houses Ramsay/OC: Ramsay rides south to the Twins for the Red Wedding and participates in the massacre. One of the Frey (grand)daughters likes what she sees, the bloodlust and ruthlessness in him, and she sees him as her chance to escape the Twins and become lady of Winterfell, as she helps him take control of the North Theon/Sansa: During the events of the Battle of the Blackwater, Robb sends Theon with a ship to King's Landing to extract Sansa, promising that in return he will give Theon her hand in marriage after the war, to thank him for his support and loyalty Jaime/Sansa: After Jaime rides North to fight the Dead, he apologizes to the Starks for everything he did to them, directly and indirectly during the war, especially apologizing to Sansa for failing to uphold his oath as a knight and protect the innocent from harm. After the War for the Dawn is over, and the living win, Jaime stays North, and with some time, eventually earns Sansa's forgiveness, and, as unlikely as he finds it, her love as well Tyrion/Sansa: During the marriage of convenience between Sansa and Tyrion, what starts as a sham eventually blossoms into genuine love and trust between the other. After Joffrey's death, they both escape the capitol, and, now considered criminals on the run, they must trust each other more than ever to survive Writing sample: The Mother of Dragons. The lost princess of House Targaryen. The legend of Daenerys Targaryen had reached Winterfell and turned everything upside down. Lord Stark, to everyone's surprise, had decided to turn on his lifelong friend and pledge the North's allegiance to House Targaryen. Robb was of two minds about it. On the one hand, he was surprised his father would break an oath. On the other hand, he understood. If rumors were true, she had the support of three of the Seven Kingdoms, alongside two more armies from Essos, and more importantly than that, three dragons. She was Aegon reborn, coming to Westeros to reclaim what was stolen from her family. If they didn't bend the knee now that they had the chance, she would come and rain fire and blood on them The next morning, the entire populations of both Winterfell and Wintertown assemble in the courtyard to catch a glimpse of the new Queen. The dragons fly overhead, masking a grand entrance as they land in the heart of the Godswood before Daenerys finally appears into view, riding a snow-white horse, flanked by Tyrion Lannister, Jorah Mormont, Missandei and Grey Worm. The Starks all kneel as she dismounts and Ned approaches her "Welcome to Winterfell, your Grace. The hospitality of Winterfell is yours. I do hope the ride from the White Harbor wasn't too taxing. Please, there's much to talk about. We have rooms prepared for you and your council. The rest of your men are free to occupy the Godswood to make camp in" he says as he leads the way inside They all share a tense breakfast in the Great Hall before Ned, Dany, Robb, and Tyrion move to the Lord's office to speak

Hey there! Today I am looking for a role set in the world of Westeros. I would like to play AUs where some seemingly small changes cause the story to change completely. I am also open to hearing your ideas as well, even outside the fandom. My ideas are: Jon/Dany (AU): After the Red Wedding, Jon flees the watch and Westeros as a whole. He goes to Mereen and finds Daenerys, and eventually he makes her give him control of her, her armies, and her dragons, and he leads the invasion himself to reclaim the Iron Throne Jon/Dany (After show): After Bran's ascension to the throne, Jon retires North of the Wall, ready to find a new life of leading the Free Folk. However, before he can, Dany and Drogon return to Westeros to demand his help deposing Bran as he's become a tyrant as the Three Eyed Raven Robb/Daenerys: Two options for this one, depending on how you want your Dany to be. Either: Dany arrives to Westeros after Drogo's death, with three newborn dragons and her Dothraki handmaidens, to stay at Winterfell under Ned Stark's protection, on the condition that she must marry Robb in exchange and become lady of Winterfell Dany arrives to Westeros after the events in Mereen, with three full grown dragons, a Dothraki horde, an Unsullied army, and her alliances with Dorne, the Reach and the Iron Islands, ready to take back her father's throne. Ned, seeing the writing on the wall for his friend, offers her his allegiance on the condition she marries Robb and takes him as King Consort Robb/Myrcella: When king Robert rides to Winterfell to ask Ned to become Hand of the King, and offers a union between Joffrey and Sansa, Ned tells him Sansa is already promised to Domeric Bolton, and instead offers to marry his heir Robb to his daughter Myrcella Jon/Sansa (AU): In an alternate timeline where Rhaegar deposed the Mad King and married Lyanna Stark, Jon Snow is raised Jaeherys Targaryen in King's Landing. When Ned Stark rides to visit his siter, the crown prince meets his cousin Sansa Stark, and the two are quickly entangled in a lustful affair that will bring headaches to both their Houses Ramsay/OC: Ramsay rides south to the Twins for the Red Wedding and participates in the massacre. One of the Frey (grand)daughters likes what she sees, the bloodlust and ruthlessness in him, and she sees him as her chance to escape the Twins and become lady of Winterfell, as she helps him take control of the North Theon/Sansa: During the events of the Battle of the Blackwater, Robb sends Theon with a ship to King's Landing to extract Sansa, promising that in return he will give Theon her hand in marriage after the war, to thank him for his support and loyalty Jaime/Sansa: After Jaime rides North to fight the Dead, he apologizes to the Starks for everything he did to them, directly and indirectly during the war, especially apologizing to Sansa for failing to uphold his oath as a knight and protect the innocent from harm. After the War for the Dawn is over, and the living win, Jaime stays North, and with some time, eventually earns Sansa's forgiveness, and, as unlikely as he finds it, her love as well Tyrion/Sansa: During the marriage of convenience between Sansa and Tyrion, what starts as a sham eventually blossoms into genuine love and trust between the other. After Joffrey's death, they both escape the capitol, and, now considered criminals on the run, they must trust each other more than ever to survive Writing sample: The Mother of Dragons. The lost princess of House Targaryen. The legend of Daenerys Targaryen had reached Winterfell and turned everything upside down. Lord Stark, to everyone's surprise, had decided to turn on his lifelong friend and pledge the North's allegiance to House Targaryen. Robb was of two minds about it. On the one hand, he was surprised his father would break an oath. On the other hand, he understood. If rumors were true, she had the support of three of the Seven Kingdoms, alongside two more armies from Essos, and more importantly than that, three dragons. She was Aegon reborn, coming to Westeros to reclaim what was stolen from her family. If they didn't bend the knee now that they had the chance, she would come and rain fire and blood on them The next morning, the entire populations of both Winterfell and Wintertown assemble in the courtyard to catch a glimpse of the new Queen. The dragons fly overhead, masking a grand entrance as they land in the heart of the Godswood before Daenerys finally appears into view, riding a snow-white horse, flanked by Tyrion Lannister, Jorah Mormont, Missandei and Grey Worm. The Starks all kneel as she dismounts and Ned approaches her "Welcome to Winterfell, your Grace. The hospitality of Winterfell is yours. I do hope the ride from the White Harbor wasn't too taxing. Please, there's much to talk about. We have rooms prepared for you and your council. The rest of your men are free to occupy the Godswood to make camp in" he says as he leads the way inside They all share a tense breakfast in the Great Hall before Ned, Dany, Robb, and Tyrion move to the Lord's office to speak

Hey there! Today I am looking for a role set in the world of Westeros. I would like to play AUs where some seemingly small changes cause the story to change completely. I am also open to hearing your ideas as well, even outside the fandom. My ideas are: Jon/Dany (AU): After the Red Wedding, Jon flees the watch and Westeros as a whole. He goes to Mereen and finds Daenerys, and eventually he makes her give him control of her, her armies, and her dragons, and he leads the invasion himself to reclaim the Iron Throne Jon/Dany (After show): After Bran's ascension to the throne, Jon retires North of the Wall, ready to find a new life of leading the Free Folk. However, before he can, Dany and Drogon return to Westeros to demand his help deposing Bran as he's become a tyrant as the Three Eyed Raven Robb/Daenerys: Two options for this one, depending on how you want your Dany to be. Either: Dany arrives to Westeros after Drogo's death, with three newborn dragons and her Dothraki handmaidens, to stay at Winterfell under Ned Stark's protection, on the condition that she must marry Robb in exchange and become lady of Winterfell Dany arrives to Westeros after the events in Mereen, with three full grown dragons, a Dothraki horde, an Unsullied army, and her alliances with Dorne, the Reach and the Iron Islands, ready to take back her father's throne. Ned, seeing the writing on the wall for his friend, offers her his allegiance on the condition she marries Robb and takes him as King Consort Robb/Myrcella: When king Robert rides to Winterfell to ask Ned to become Hand of the King, and offers a union between Joffrey and Sansa, Ned tells him Sansa is already promised to Domeric Bolton, and instead offers to marry his heir Robb to his daughter Myrcella Jon/Sansa (AU): In an alternate timeline where Rhaegar deposed the Mad King and married Lyanna Stark, Jon Snow is raised Jaeherys Targaryen in King's Landing. When Ned Stark rides to visit his siter, the crown prince meets his cousin Sansa Stark, and the two are quickly entangled in a lustful affair that will bring headaches to both their Houses Ramsay/OC: Ramsay rides south to the Twins for the Red Wedding and participates in the massacre. One of the Frey (grand)daughters likes what she sees, the bloodlust and ruthlessness in him, and she sees him as her chance to escape the Twins and become lady of Winterfell, as she helps him take control of the North Theon/Sansa: During the events of the Battle of the Blackwater, Robb sends Theon with a ship to King's Landing to extract Sansa, promising that in return he will give Theon her hand in marriage after the war, to thank him for his support and loyalty Jaime/Sansa: After Jaime rides North to fight the Dead, he apologizes to the Starks for everything he did to them, directly and indirectly during the war, especially apologizing to Sansa for failing to uphold his oath as a knight and protect the innocent from harm. After the War for the Dawn is over, and the living win, Jaime stays North, and with some time, eventually earns Sansa's forgiveness, and, as unlikely as he finds it, her love as well Tyrion/Sansa: During the marriage of convenience between Sansa and Tyrion, what starts as a sham eventually blossoms into genuine love and trust between the other. After Joffrey's death, they both escape the capitol, and, now considered criminals on the run, they must trust each other more than ever to survive Writing sample: The Mother of Dragons. The lost princess of House Targaryen. The legend of Daenerys Targaryen had reached Winterfell and turned everything upside down. Lord Stark, to everyone's surprise, had decided to turn on his lifelong friend and pledge the North's allegiance to House Targaryen. Robb was of two minds about it. On the one hand, he was surprised his father would break an oath. On the other hand, he understood. If rumors were true, she had the support of three of the Seven Kingdoms, alongside two more armies from Essos, and more importantly than that, three dragons. She was Aegon reborn, coming to Westeros to reclaim what was stolen from her family. If they didn't bend the knee now that they had the chance, she would come and rain fire and blood on them The next morning, the entire populations of both Winterfell and Wintertown assemble in the courtyard to catch a glimpse of the new Queen. The dragons fly overhead, masking a grand entrance as they land in the heart of the Godswood before Daenerys finally appears into view, riding a snow-white horse, flanked by Tyrion Lannister, Jorah Mormont, Missandei and Grey Worm. The Starks all kneel as she dismounts and Ned approaches her "Welcome to Winterfell, your Grace. The hospitality of Winterfell is yours. I do hope the ride from the White Harbor wasn't too taxing. Please, there's much to talk about. We have rooms prepared for you and your council. The rest of your men are free to occupy the Godswood to make camp in" he says as he leads the way inside They all share a tense breakfast in the Great Hall before Ned, Dany, Robb, and Tyrion move to the Lord's office to speak

Hey there! Today I am looking for a role set in the world of Westeros. I would like to play AUs where some seemingly small changes cause the story to change completely. I am also open to hearing your ideas as well, even outside the fandom. My ideas are: Jon/Dany (AU): After the Red Wedding, Jon flees the watch and Westeros as a whole. He goes to Mereen and finds Daenerys, and eventually he makes her give him control of her, her armies, and her dragons, and he leads the invasion himself to reclaim the Iron Throne Jon/Dany (After show): After Bran's ascension to the throne, Jon retires North of the Wall, ready to find a new life of leading the Free Folk. However, before he can, Dany and Drogon return to Westeros to demand his help deposing Bran as he's become a tyrant as the Three Eyed Raven Robb/Daenerys: Two options for this one, depending on how you want your Dany to be. Either: Dany arrives to Westeros after Drogo's death, with three newborn dragons and her Dothraki handmaidens, to stay at Winterfell under Ned Stark's protection, on the condition that she must marry Robb in exchange and become lady of Winterfell Dany arrives to Westeros after the events in Mereen, with three full grown dragons, a Dothraki horde, an Unsullied army, and her alliances with Dorne, the Reach and the Iron Islands, ready to take back her father's throne. Ned, seeing the writing on the wall for his friend, offers her his allegiance on the condition she marries Robb and takes him as King Consort Robb/Myrcella: When king Robert rides to Winterfell to ask Ned to become Hand of the King, and offers a union between Joffrey and Sansa, Ned tells him Sansa is already promised to Domeric Bolton, and instead offers to marry his heir Robb to his daughter Myrcella Jon/Sansa (AU): In an alternate timeline where Rhaegar deposed the Mad King and married Lyanna Stark, Jon Snow is raised Jaeherys Targaryen in King's Landing. When Ned Stark rides to visit his siter, the crown prince meets his cousin Sansa Stark, and the two are quickly entangled in a lustful affair that will bring headaches to both their Houses Ramsay/OC: Ramsay rides south to the Twins for the Red Wedding and participates in the massacre. One of the Frey (grand)daughters likes what she sees, the bloodlust and ruthlessness in him, and she sees him as her chance to escape the Twins and become lady of Winterfell, as she helps him take control of the North Theon/Sansa: During the events of the Battle of the Blackwater, Robb sends Theon with a ship to King's Landing to extract Sansa, promising that in return he will give Theon her hand in marriage after the war, to thank him for his support and loyalty Jaime/Sansa: After Jaime rides North to fight the Dead, he apologizes to the Starks for everything he did to them, directly and indirectly during the war, especially apologizing to Sansa for failing to uphold his oath as a knight and protect the innocent from harm. After the War for the Dawn is over, and the living win, Jaime stays North, and with some time, eventually earns Sansa's forgiveness, and, as unlikely as he finds it, her love as well Tyrion/Sansa: During the marriage of convenience between Sansa and Tyrion, what starts as a sham eventually blossoms into genuine love and trust between the other. After Joffrey's death, they both escape the capitol, and, now considered criminals on the run, they must trust each other more than ever to survive Writing sample: The Mother of Dragons. The lost princess of House Targaryen. The legend of Daenerys Targaryen had reached Winterfell and turned everything upside down. Lord Stark, to everyone's surprise, had decided to turn on his lifelong friend and pledge the North's allegiance to House Targaryen. Robb was of two minds about it. On the one hand, he was surprised his father would break an oath. On the other hand, he understood. If rumors were true, she had the support of three of the Seven Kingdoms, alongside two more armies from Essos, and more importantly than that, three dragons. She was Aegon reborn, coming to Westeros to reclaim what was stolen from her family. If they didn't bend the knee now that they had the chance, she would come and rain fire and blood on them The next morning, the entire populations of both Winterfell and Wintertown assemble in the courtyard to catch a glimpse of the new Queen. The dragons fly overhead, masking a grand entrance as they land in the heart of the Godswood before Daenerys finally appears into view, riding a snow-white horse, flanked by Tyrion Lannister, Jorah Mormont, Missandei and Grey Worm. The Starks all kneel as she dismounts and Ned approaches her "Welcome to Winterfell, your Grace. The hospitality of Winterfell is yours. I do hope the ride from the White Harbor wasn't too taxing. Please, there's much to talk about. We have rooms prepared for you and your council. The rest of your men are free to occupy the Godswood to make camp in" he says as he leads the way inside They all share a tense breakfast in the Great Hall before Ned, Dany, Robb, and Tyrion move to the Lord's office to speak

Hey there! Today I am looking for a role set in the world of Westeros. I would like to play AUs where some seemingly small changes cause the story to change completely. I am also open to hearing your ideas as well, even outside the fandom. My ideas are:
Jon/Dany (AU): After the Red Wedding, Jon flees the watch and Westeros as a whole. He goes to Mereen and finds Daenerys, and eventually he makes her give him control of her, her armies, and her dragons, and he leads the invasion himself to reclaim the Iron Throne
Jon/Dany (After show): After Bran's ascension to the throne, Jon retires North of the Wall, ready to find a new life of leading the Free Folk. However, before he can, Dany and Drogon return to Westeros to demand his help deposing Bran as he's become a tyrant as the Three Eyed Raven
Robb/Daenerys: Two options for this one, depending on how you want your Dany to be. Either:
Dany arrives to Westeros after Drogo's death, with three newborn dragons and her Dothraki handmaidens, to stay at Winterfell under Ned Stark's protection, on the condition that she must marry Robb in exchange and become lady of Winterfell
Dany arrives to Westeros after the events in Mereen, with three full grown dragons, a Dothraki horde, an Unsullied army, and her alliances with Dorne, the Reach and the Iron Islands, ready to take back her father's throne. Ned, seeing the writing on the wall for his friend, offers her his allegiance on the condition she marries Robb and takes him as King Consort
Robb/Myrcella: When king Robert rides to Winterfell to ask Ned to become Hand of the King, and offers a union between Joffrey and Sansa, Ned tells him Sansa is already promised to Domeric Bolton, and instead offers to marry his heir Robb to his daughter Myrcella
Jon/Sansa (AU): In an alternate timeline where Rhaegar deposed the Mad King and married Lyanna Stark, Jon Snow is raised Jaeherys Targaryen in King's Landing. When Ned Stark rides to visit his siter, the crown prince meets his cousin Sansa Stark, and the two are quickly entangled in a lustful affair that will bring headaches to both their Houses
Ramsay/OC: Ramsay rides south to the Twins for the Red Wedding and participates in the massacre. One of the Frey (grand)daughters likes what she sees, the bloodlust and ruthlessness in him, and she sees him as her chance to escape the Twins and become lady of Winterfell, as she helps himtake control of the North
Theon/Sansa: During the events of the Battle of the Blackwater, Robb sends Theon with a ship to King's Landing to extract Sansa, promising that in return he will give Theon her hand in marriage after the war, to thank him for his support and loyalty
Jaime/Sansa: After Jaime rides North to fight the Dead, he apologizes to the Starks for everything he did to them, directly and indirectly during the war, especially apologizing to Sansa for failing to uphold his oath as a knight and protect the innocent from harm. After the War for the Dawn is over, and the living win, Jaime stays North, and with some time, eventually earns Sansa's forgiveness, and, as unlikely as he finds it, her love as well
Tyrion/Sansa: During the marriage of convenience between Sansa and Tyrion, what starts as a sham eventually blossoms into genuine love and trust between the other. After Joffrey's death, they both escape the capitol, and, now considered criminals on the run, they must trust each other more than ever to survive
Writing sample:
The Mother of Dragons. The lost princess of House Targaryen. The legend of Daenerys Targaryen had reached Winterfell and turned everything upside down. Lord Stark, to everyone's surprise, had decided to turn on his lifelong friend and pledge the North's allegiance to House Targaryen. Robb was of two minds about it. On the one hand, he was surprised his father would break an oath. On the other hand, he understood. If rumors were true, she had the support of three of the Seven Kingdoms, alongside two more armies from Essos, and more importantly than that, three dragons. She was Aegon reborn, coming to Westeros to reclaim what was stolen from her family. If they didn't bend the knee now that they had the chance, she would come and rain fire and blood on them
The next morning, the entire populations of both Winterfell and Wintertown assemble in the courtyard to catch a glimpse of the new Queen. The dragons fly overhead, masking a grand entrance as they land in the heart of the Godswood before Daenerys finally appears into view, riding a snow-white horse, flanked by Tyrion Lannister, Jorah Mormont, Missandei and Grey Worm. The Starks all kneel as she dismounts and Ned approaches her "Welcome to Winterfell, your Grace. The hospitality of Winterfell is yours. I do hope the ride from the White Harbor wasn't too taxing. Please, there's much to talk about. We have rooms prepared for you and your council. The rest of your men are free to occupy the Godswood to make camp in" he says as he leads the way inside
They all share a tense breakfast in the Great Hall before Ned, Dany, Robb, and Tyrion move to the Lord's office to speak

^{11th Moon Raventree Hall}
Was it luck?
Fortune, perhaps, Joffrey decided. Or... well, he couldn't quite decide. He was a godly man, but one with much and more blood on his hands. Not literal blood. That would've been better; it would have pleased those whispers he yearned to hear if the unfaithful had been slain.
But no. It was his own kin that he shoved over to the fires, and though he longed for the pangs of regret and the wages of sin, he was granted only blessings.
He giggled when he saw the rider arriving through the gates. Down the dirt path and into the courtyard, undisturbed by the guards who knew him, the horseman only dismounted before the timber keep.
"Lucifer!" yelled Joff from his room, quickly going to open the door and descend down the steps. The keep was his, for now.
"Tell Lucifer to meet me in the godswood," he told a servant, barely able to contain his joy. Down the steps and into the great hall and out again into the courtyard, Joff received the rider with a quick few beckons. "Well? What happened? Did you succeed? Was—"
It was then that he saw it.
The cloaked rider produced a rolled-up carpet from his horse's saddle. "Aye, milord. Me, eh... trading mission was a success. Secured ye' some rare goods." Cradling the rug, he took some steps forward and offered it to the Blackwood.
Joff grinned. He took possession of the rug. Myrish in origin, and... surprisingly weighty. Perhaps it was the implication that rested therein. Of power. Of the many, many, many hours and hands that it took to craft such a magnificent thing. Or even the lives lost, the souls imbued in its... stitches.
And yet, the threat still loomed as if it were a blade brushing against the nape of his neck. His hair stood in place, gooseflesh marking his arms. His heart beat harder—not from a surfeit of exertion—as he went to the great tree that gave the castle its name. Quick steps. Slower, when he heard the cawing of ravens, gathered round and peering on with queer black eyes that mirrored his own.
It was not long before Lucifer showed. "Cousin?" said the bastard, rather puzzled.
"Do you hear them?" Joff stared up at the tree, mouth agape in awe. "The gods. Do you hear them?"
A grunt came from Lucifer. "Not really."
"Well—me neither." The tree was dead anyways, and Joff never had a knack for communing with the gods. "But that's not the point. They would be pleased, Lucifer. Very, very pleased." Joff turned then, revealing the rug to his cousin with a wide grin. "You'll wield this. For them."
"Is this some kind of joke?" Lucifer chuckled. "A carpet? Really?"
He didn't realize it, did he? All that he'd drilled into his head of avenging their faith, of keeping it in place, of defending against all manner of foemen—the Faith Militant, the turncloak converts, even Lady Tully. They would all see their tree burned or cut down by their vile axes.
Joff took the initiative. He placed the carpet on the ground and slowly unfurled it. Inch by inch, smoky grey steel, six feet in length and as wide as a man's hand, unveiled itself before the eyes of gods and men and roosting ravens.
Ice.
"What—" Lucifer stared down at the ripples that ran through the great sword, a sword of kings, a sword of winter, a sword of fate that was now to be kept theirs.
"Stark. He thinks himself better than us." Joff found some confidence in himself. The gods spoke for him. "Better than his faith. Better than his blood! No, no, no, it can't stand. This," he knelt, running a hand near the blade's wintry edge, "will stir him out of his folly."

Synopsis:

Nine years following the execution of the old Sovereign, the four dukedoms of Augustein teeter on the brink of combustion.
Excess magic ore mining has resulted in unstable regions of shifting trees, violent storms, and a creeping plague of stillness that leaves everything frozen in time. Watchmen struggle to fend off the relentless attacks of Aberrations, while strict regulations on magic ore force aspiring magicians to sacrifice their own finite reserves at the cost of their health and, ultimately, their lives.
Amara is the sole survivor of a series of magic experiments ordered by the old Sovereign. Left with a reduced lifespan and an unnatural magic with the unique ability to progress, Amara is determined to live out the rest of her life to its fullest.
She’s going out like an explosion, and she’ll make sure that no one can look away.
—
This is a character focused, slow-burn high fantasy story with progression and light LitRPG elements that become prominent after the introductory arc, which spans through chapter 20.
It features flawed and morally ambiguous characters, unreliable narrators, and some darker elements, but there are plenty of lighter moments as well!

​
Prologue - End of an Era
Rosenfell Palace, Helisturn, Arcvale Dukedom of Augustein, Year 986
The palace halls glowed in the evening light. The last rays of sunlight filtered through cracked and broken windows, outlining piles of debris in gold. Clouds of dust rose from broken pillars and walls, shimmering as they drifted over cold, limp figures strewn about like fallen leaves. The plush red carpet, once bright and soft as snow, had been torn and shredded beyond recognition. Dark splotches littered its surface, many areas now beginning to dry and crack while still others remained moist to the touch.
A few hours ago, when the sun had still hung suspended in the clear blue sky, the palace walls had been trapped in a flurry of motion. The ringing of metal against metal, the pounding of heavy footsteps, and the shrill sounds of screams had echoed throughout the space as an invading wave of violence swept the pristine halls. Now, in the aftermath, an unnatural stillness had come to replace the rush.
A young man turned the corner, whistling an old folk song to himself as he walked. He wore an electric blue uniform that was crumpled and ripped around its edges. The color was mirrored by the single glove he wore on his left hand. His right hand was bare, and a lingering ultramarine light outlined a string of letters and numbers across his skin.
One particularly large stain covered nearly the entire stomach region of his uniform, a dark rust red that crumbled slightly whenever the man moved. A few stray splotches of the same color dotted his messy hair and tan skin, but the man made no motion to wipe the droplets off. Nor did he move to clean the equally bloodied spear strapped behind his back, the metal glinting in the sunlight. He simply strode forward with the laxness of a casual stroll, his eyes drifting about the ruined hallway and still corpses.
Finally, after he’d passed by shattered portraits and kicked aside a few bodies blocking the way with his boots, the man came to a halt.
“Oh, there it is.”
Crouching down, the man picked up a single glove lying in a dark pool of viscous liquid. He shook it a few times, and the fabric made a squelching noise. He frowned. The glove was so stained that barely any of the original blue color remained, but on closer inspection, the cloth itself seemed to be holding up well enough. Shrugging, the man slid it on, hiding the glowing numbers that were only just beginning to fade from the back of his hand.
​
ALLEN
Magic Reserves: 101,897 / 122,043
Maximum Output: 13
Variability: 6
​
AFFINITIES
Energy: 50% Minor
Motion: 100% Major
Form: 50% Minor
Perception: 25% Basic
Emotions: 50% Minor
Mind: 25% Basic
Time: 0% None
Probability: 0% None
​
1 ACTIVE ATTUNEMENT
​
“Allen!”
The man in question turned at the sound of his name being called. He raised an eyebrow at the sight of a similarly dressed soldier running forward, who halted when he saw the wreckage within the hallway. Henry’s eyes swept across the scattered bodies, and after a moment of hesitation, he continued forward with careful steps.
The two of them had been watchmen in the same area before Allen had been promoted to Duke Valister’s personal guard, and they’d reunited during the coup’s planning stages. The man was rather friendly, even excessively so at times, and he’d always treated Allen with a somewhat uncomfortable degree of reverence despite being older. But then again, magical prowess always trumped age when it came to respect.
Henry came to a stop a few feet away. In comparison to Allen, his uniform, while still stained and rumpled, was in significantly better condition, and his two gloves were a plain brown rather than blue. He frowned when his eyes fell on Allen’s very bloody glove, shuddering slightly.
“Isn’t that uncomfortable?”
Allen stretched his fingers in response, and the gloves made a squishy sound. “Eh, it still works fine.” He took a moment to assess the other man, cocking his head to the side and grinning at Henry’s poorly concealed disgust. “What, you squeamish?”
“I’m not,” Henry insisted, not meeting his eyes. Allen took a step forward. The other man’s fidgeting was even more obvious up close, and now that he paid more attention, his pale skin had taken on a greenish hue. Allen’s eyes briefly swept over the scattered bodies before returning again. He raised an eyebrow.
“Need me to use emotion magic?”
That made Henry’s head snap up, eyes widening in alarm. “I didn’t know you had an affinity—no wait, that’s not the point.” He shook his head and cleared his throat. “I’m fine, I swear! I’m just, uh, more used to fighting Aberrations.” Not humans.
“It’s just a minor affinity, but I’ve gotten pretty good with it.” Allen shrugged. “Fair enough. Anyway, what’re you doing here?”
“We’re supposed to report to the throne room,” Henry explained. “I came to get you.”
Allen hummed in response. He turned and began to slowly head back down the hallway, Henry following at his heels. “So Raymoth’s dead, right?”
Henry’s eyes darted around nervously, as if he was worried a ghost would appear at the mere utterance of the name. He nodded and cleared his throat. “Yeah, uh, I heard Duke Valister and Duchess Rosevale both did it.”
Allen whistled. “Oh really? Figured it’d just be the Duchess.” Then again, Duke Valister’s disdain for the former Sovereign was well known among his guards. Hell, Allen was half convinced the main reason the Duke had joined the alliance at all was to be part of the Raymoth family’s demise.
Turning the corner, Allen continued down a wider hallway that was in significantly better condition than the one they’d just been in. Not as much direct fighting had taken place there, and any that did had been over fast enough to minimize the mess. Allen glanced around as they walked, but he couldn’t see any other soldiers around. He guessed most didn’t want to risk disrespecting the new Sovereign. He didn’t know her very well, but from the few times he’d seen Duchess Rosevale before and during the coup, he’d understood why her soldiers were so convinced of her victory. She moved with a silent, unyielding assuredness, as if she already was the Sovereign.
For a few minutes neither of the two spoke as they continued to weave their way through the admittedly large palace. Allen didn’t even know what half the rooms were for; he’d probably go crazy if he had to live somewhere like this.
Allen could feel Henry’s eyes watching him, and he turned his head back, eyebrow raised. “What?”
The other man coughed and looked away. “Sorry, it’s just…” his voice trailed. “Did you hear about the notes?”
Allen frowned and slowed his pace. “What notes?”
Henry stared at the ground ahead of them uncomfortably. “When they ransacked Sove—Duke Raymoth’s,” he corrected, “—notes, they found some really…disturbing stuff. Something about magic experiments going on in northern Vanstead, kidnapping kids, stuff like that.” He swallowed, voice quieting to barely above a whisper. “But the thing is, they showed the notes to the Duke and Duchess, but they said it didn’t concern them. I heard—I heard Duke Valister even said it’d be interesting to keep an eye on them.”
That sounded exactly like something the Duke would say. The two of them turned another corner. Allen also didn’t doubt for a second that the Raymoths would’ve been involved in something like that. Aldridge Raymoth had gone a bit off the deep end in the past decade, and continued magic experiments on children sounded exactly like the sort of thing he would resort to.
“Do you really think they’re gonna let them continue?” Henry asked, voice visibly distressed. Surely the new regime will be better than that, was the unspoken thought.
Before Allen could respond, however, a third voice interrupted them.
“You’re late.”
The two came to a halt as a new figure stepped forward from behind a pillar. Allen frowned in recognition.
Desmond Reinford was one of the commanding officers of the Rosevales’ troops. He was around the same age as Allen, but the similarities stopped there. His uniform, as opposed to blue, was a deep red color that contrasted against his dark skin and hair. The man stood slightly shorter than average, but had such impeccable posture that he often seemed taller, unlike Allen who perpetually slouched. His uniform was crisp and without a single stain or tear in sight, and the sheathed rapier at his waist looked equally pristine. If Allen hadn’t seen the man during the coup, he would’ve thought that he hadn’t fought at all.
What most stood out, however, were the man’s gloves. They were a pure, stark white that almost seemed to glow in the quickly dimming hallway. Allen stared at them.
“Looks like someone got promoted.”
Henry nudged his elbow, but Allen didn’t stop staring. His friend laughed nervously. “Sorry sir, we, uh, got lost in the hallways?”
“I dropped my glove,” Allen said bluntly. He pointed at the stained glove in question. It was beginning to dry now, and the fabric was a little stiff.
Desmond met his gaze, eyes cold and sharp. Allen heard Henry swallow beside him.
“I see,” the man said. He gestured down the hallway, where the large, heavy throne room doors stood in the distance. Their deep mahogany surface shone, the light highlighting the intricate carvings detailing Augustein’s myths. All three of the major houses’ crests were carved into the wood, though where the banner of the ruling house would normally hang was empty, soon to be replaced with a new dynasty. Allen couldn’t help but wonder if they’d get a new door, one with the Valister’s crest replacing the Raymoths. Coups had happened plenty of times in their history, but never had one of the three major houses been completely decimated like this.
“The Sovereign is giving promotions and rewards to those of us who fought in the coup,” Desmond said. “I suggest you go before all the ore is taken.” Without another word, the man turned and strode away, likely to check the rest of the palace for stragglers, Allen guessed.
Beside him, Henry’s eyes lit up at the mention of magic ore, only to immediately deflate when the rest of Desmond’s words settled. Allen slapped him on the back.
“Don’t worry, they’ve probably got specific ore rations set aside for everyone. No way they’d just let us take them in a free for all.” Allen was frankly impressed that they were giving away ore at all, considering how stingy the nobility was with it.
Henry looked hopeful at that. “You think?”
Allen nodded. “Yeah, don’t worry. He’s just being an asshole.”
The other man winced slightly. His eyes darted around. “Uh, maybe you shouldn’t say that out loud? Especially, especially if he’s a Rose now.”
“Oh he definitely is.” No one wore white gloves but the Roses, the elite soldiers who served the Sovereign directly and were the most effective at combating Aberrations. All of them were certified as court magicians, and they were handpicked by the Sovereign. Considering the old Sovereign was now dead and a significant chunk of the former Roses had gone down with him, Allen guessed Duchess Rosevale was combing through her personal guard for people to promote. As far as he knew, Desmond had already passed the court magician test, so he would’ve been an easy pick.
He cracked his shoulder and sighed. The adrenaline rush from the coup had been fading for a while now, but now that the sun had nearly set fully and the shadows of the hallway had grown to engulf a majority of its surface, a new wave of exhaustion was settling into his bones.
“Come on, let’s hurry up,” he said. Henry nodded and hurried behind him.
As they passed by a tall window, Allen took a moment to glance outside. A few sprays of stars were visible in the darkening sky, and he could see city lights glowing in the distance as the lamplighters made their rounds. It was, by all accounts, a peaceful night, one that continued completely divorced from the happenings in the palace.
Surely the whole city would’ve heard about the coup. Allen wondered if even now, citizens were huddled together in their homes, or if they stood outside straining their necks to see what was happening in the palace. Waiting to learn the fate of the country.
Allen peeled his eyes away, facing forward and continuing down the hallway towards the throne room.
—
Penrith, Vanstead Dukedom of Augustein Year 995
High up in the watchtower, the villagers looked like a dark stream flowing between the buildings and flooding down the dirt road, some running south, others crossing streets for final traveling preparations and goodbyes.
Two nights ago, the forest had swallowed the village north of them. The watchman had seen it happen, had witnessed the ground tremble and the branches snake out, enveloping the homes, growing and then shrinking, twisting and dancing among the perfectly still buildings. He was almost glad no one had been outside, because that way he didn’t have to see the victims. But then, if the residents of those homes were outdoors, perhaps they would’ve managed to escape.
Or maybe he had seen the bodies and simply hadn’t recognized them, hadn’t managed to distinguish them from the twisted trunks and undulating ground. The warping of the forest was no more merciful to any living creatures who stumbled upon it, and the watchman, for all his years observing the shifting trees, couldn’t say with confidence that he’d be able to tell a corpse apart.
The man leaned forward against the wooden railing, peering down at the commotion. Given the speed the forest had moved at, he estimated they had a week at most before this town, too, was consumed. His own single bag lay packed near the front door of his home, ready to be picked up at a moment’s notice. Though he estimated most would be gone within the next three days, maybe excluding some particularly stubborn folks, the watchman didn’t plan on escaping until everyone else was gone first. Useless sentiment though it may be, he still had his pride.
The waves of people finally began to thin down as the current crowd left, leaving behind the remaining villagers. About twice as many people had left that day than the day before, the watchman estimated.
He sighed and shook his head. Now that the chaos had died down, those lingering on the streets continued with their business. His eyes glanced down at his watch, and he realized his shift had ended three minutes ago.
The watchman stepped back from the railing and stretched his arms. Maybe he’d stop by the tavern. Wallace, the owner, was adamant about keeping it open until “the last damn day we got,” which he appreciated. Just as he turned to go, however, a flash of orange caught his eye. He frowned and leaned over the wooden railing to peer further down the streets.
There, entering from the southern gates, a figure moved opposite to the direction the fleeing stream had taken.
A young woman was walking leisurely forward, her short wavy hair glinting as it caught the rays of sunlight. The lack of panic, hurry, or fear in her eyes made the watchman blink. There was only casual curiosity, as though she had simply been on a stroll and ran across an interesting plant. Her medium brown complexion was somewhat rare in northern Vanstead; perhaps she was from the south and hadn’t heard about the forest creeping closer? The watchman didn’t know how else to make sense of someone deliberately choosing to enter the town at such a time.
The closer the woman approached, the more details became evident. The watchman’s eyes widened.
The woman’s bare arms were covered in scars. Long, jagged lines and thin, thread-like marks. Raised bursts and patches of wrinkled and pulled skin. Some scars had an almost systematic pattern to them, neat and intentioned, while others were so chaotically scattered that it was impossible to differentiate where one began and another one ended.
For several moments the watchman simply stared at her, unable to peel his eyes away, when a sudden movement broke him out of his trance. The woman was waving enthusiastically in his direction.
Brow furrowed, the watchman watched as the woman ran up to the base of the tower, moving deceptively fast. She grinned up at him, beaming and utterly uncaring of the twisting forest approaching in the distance or of the half empty village and the stares she was already receiving.
Head tilted back, her green eyes seemed to glow in the light.
“Hey, can you give me some directions?”
​
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Author's Note:

Hello, I hope you're enjoying the story so far! I decided to finally post here after lurking for a while now. I'm planning on slowly posting all the chapters I've already published on Royal Road, one per day so I don't spam the sub.
Fair warning, I absolutely suck at formatting things on Reddit (trying to format this chapter was a struggle), so sorry in advance for any formatting issues.
Thanks for reading!

It is a well known fact within this galaxy that humans place an extraordinary amount of respect on their fallen service members. I was gifted recently to be able to visit a human world on a holiday called “memorial day”. On memorial day the remember and pay their respects to their service members who fell in the line of duty.
As I got off the transport vehicle, they called it a bus, I immediately took in the sight. Rows of banners with blue stars on them, with intermittent gold stars. I would later come to learn what this meant. I followed the crowd, while mainly human there were the intermittent Rakhari, Telechian, Avian, and a few from many of the other species that make up the Galactic Commonwealth. While there I bumped into an old Human friend of mine from the academy days. After catching up, he told me “Hey, follow me. Theres going to be a speech and I want you to hear it.”
Because I wasnt on the guest list I didnt get a seat, but I was able to stand just off to the side of the seats. Behind the seating area there was a group of maybe a hundred army cadets standing at parade rest in their dress uniforms. A dozen individuals gave their own speeches before a General made his way to the stand. He talked about those he had served with, and lost, during his time in service. How fifteen years ago, as a young captain, his company was at a firebase when they were attacked by pirates. How he buried three of his brothers the next day. And how he has witnessed more memorial services than that. How final roll calls can be heart tearing- hearing a name called off that you may never hear again. The loss of a brother or sister, how it hurts more than he can emphasis. He then went on too explain the gold and blue stars.
The blue stars are put out by family members who have immediate family currently in the military. A gold star represents a family member who has fallen in recent memory. I looked at the group of cadets and noticed the looks on some of their faces. I quickly realized that some of the cadets may not be the first of their family to join the military. As the cermonies concluded my friend showed me to the parade route. I saw as.. Thousands of service members and civilians marched down main street, from the city hall to a cemetery within the city. We moved with the procession and arrived at a memorial within the cemetery. There, the general from earlier gave another speech. This speech was about the effects losing a soldier has on a family, and about how this memorial was funded by a mother who lost two sons and a daughter in service of Humanity’s forces assigned to the Galactic Council.
Shortly thereafter a 21-gun salute was rendered, and the crowd dismissed. I later found out that the memorial was called the Centris Three Memorial- in memory of those who fell in defense of this planet. Centris Three, the place where humanity’s first true war on the galactic stage happened.
Humanity remembers their fallen, and they also remember their past. It is with this I leave you. Humanity has yet to lose a war on the galactic stage despite the fact that they have almost lost their home. Which is why I am requesting that we hire human instructors at our own military training facilities, so we can learn from their history of war. Additionally, I believe we should have a similar holiday, as it is ultimately our history and culture that defines us as a species.

Hey all, Realmfire here. So this one was kind of hard for me to write. While it's not my best work it is… kind of personal to me. In fact, a few of the parts of this story are either directly inspired by my experiences or the experiences of those around me. Lest we forget those have gone before. Have a good one all.

EDIT: filler picture so Reddit doesn't show my FUCKING CRYING FACE AS A THUMBNAIL LOL
Oh well, here we go again.
You know something has rattled your soul to the core when you suddenly feel an urge to go make a bazillion character post on Reddit. I've been to more than a dozen BM shows at this point, but only once have I felt the urge to post something like this before. Today, my dear kitsune-tachi, is the second time.
The dust after Bangkok show has settled, I'm completely emotionally drained, and overcharged at the same time. This was hands down one of the very best BM concerts I've attended. To be completely honest this is easily top 3 right after LMG and Helsinki (ok this one's odd so I'll quickly explain: this was the show where I was center barrier in a tiniest of venues with a stage so low and so close to the barrier, it seemed that the band was playing just for me in my living room, and I didn't even notice the dead crowd until I heard other hardcore fans in the pit ranting about it right after the show). Actually, not even "right after", but "alongside". It felt so good.
The circumstances of me getting to the show are batshit insane so I'll definitely give you that context. I've been monitoring flight prices for Bangkok for 2-3 months before, and they have always fluctuated around 1k USD for a roundtrip from Moscow (where I live). So on may 25th, at 11:00 pm in the evening, just for the sake of it I decide to check how much would it cost to fly to Bangkok the very next day. And I see a roundtrip flight through Manama, Bahrain, departing from DME on the 26th at 16:10, at 550$. The lowest price I've seen in many months. I frantically check the availability of show tickets. They are all available including VIP!! Well... Then there was a night of booking various things and packing my shit, and then an absolutely insane morning at work where I had to sort everything out in 3 hours to ensure my unavailability until Tuesday morning wouldn't negatively impact the company in any way until I had to leave for the airport at like ~12 pm.
I'm so glad I followed that urge to JUST GO. I wouldn't have even beat myself over it if I didn't, but it's really funny to think that there is another Polifem in a parallel universe somewhere who decided to go to bed instead of checking ticket prices, having absolutely no clue that he could've got an insane charge of positive energy for many months to come... And could've been sitting after the show with a bunch of Thai fans with a beer in hand, speaking no common language but vibing in the exact same emotional register with them. AND I'M SO HAPPY I'M NOT HIM!
So, how was the show itself?
Well. Funny how some things are totally different in an actual live environment compared to recordings, both pro-shot, and fancams. For example, we meme about Distortion constantly (including myself), but there's nothing more fun than shouting Alissa's lines and Wowowow's during C&R on top of your lungs at a concert. You can meme all you want about "worst setlist" if it has Distortion in it, but it's actually this song that will get your voice completely fucked at a show. Or gimme chocolate. Yeah, it's old, and hardcore fans are sick and tired of it, however, have you tried to jump as high as you can during the chorus following the exact rhythm of a snare drum? Try that at home, you're gonna be surprised. You'll instinctively be doing it live, and it's hella fun. Also it's great that the full instrumental mute is back in RoR for the smaller shows. The fact that it wasn't there in the 2019-2020 US/EU tour was really disappointing, this has always been a moment of great unification between the fans and the band, good thing that they now do it not only in Japan.
The whole setlist was an absolute fire, which was the general consensus right after Jakarta show, so I kinda knew what I was getting when booking tickets (I STILL can't believe how fucking crazy is that. I actually watched the fancam of the entire Jakarta show at home having absolutely no idea I'll actually be at the very next show in 3 days in person LOL 😂), but some things I already mentioned above, and some things about to be mentioned, still surprised me. Here are some highlights:
1) I really loved that both the opening and ending songs were BMD and IDZ respectively, since they hold a very special place in my heart. I've always wanted to hear BMD live ever since that first barrage of sound on the Wembley blu-ray, which completely and irreversibly punched me into the fox hole, and it really did rattle my bones live like hell. IDZ is simply my favourite song by BM and having it close the show was something truly inspiring.
2) I also considered GREAT the lack of stupid lore at the end. Having girls themselves say goodbye felt a lot more human and the show itself felt a lot more complete. All they did is said a couple of kind words, thanked for coming, asked how was the show, bowed, and left after saying goodbye in thai. But the impact of that felt really different from the usual lore shenanigans, and it was a lot more fulfilling.
3) Fucking Anthony Barone, why are you so good? Honestly his drumming brings so much energy and brutal vibe to the show, you cannot even properly deal with it. There was a fill, I think in iine of all things, which made my mind completely shut down and go "WHHAAAAT?!" He's the GOAT and his style suits this band immensely.
4) New costumes fit the girls really nicely and look gorgeous live. Lighting had a great production as well which enhanced that feeling. I actually think that the high quality video will be able to convey the full awesomeness of their costumes, so when the BD of the Clear Night gets released, everyone will have a chance to properly look at them.
5) They considerably upped their game with the video footage. I thought to myself that the screen is finally helping the experience instead of tampering with the flow of the show. Kami did get lost again, but the ladies looked amazing with the footage behind them, especially in MAYA, IDZ (the thumbs up moment in front of the starry sky was really amazing), and PA PA YA with fire and shit.
6) Speaking of... Well, I cannot just say nothing about PA PA YA here, can I? It's the biggest elephant in the room in this show after all. One big, charismatic, rapping Thai elephant in a magnificent red coat with a towel in his hand. AND IT WAS HEAT!!! Well first of all, the amount of towels in the first few rows (I was center in the 3rd row) was as many as you could've hoped for. Second of all, F.Hero was unbelievably lively and charismatic. He drowned the entire hall with his energy! Girls were having the time of their lives as well, they seemed very relaxed, it was obvious they didn't really rehearse his feat and improvised on the go, and that actually made the whole thing really special. Honestly, I recommend you go watch some fancams of his cameo, you'll get it.
7) The high kick in BxMxC instead of the usual ponytail headbang by Su really deserves its own honorable mention. When she just brutally kicked the air almost higher than her own height, it was obvious that no, they didn't actually get tired on the long tour with Sabaton. You don't do shit like this when you're off your game.
8) There were a couple of technical hiccups during the encore, particularly with Su. They had her backtrack stand out too much during one moment in MK (not nearly on the level of Kagerou in Moscow, but it was still visible), and also forgot to switch her mic on in the opening notes of IDZ so the first "rururu"s weren't there at all, which is a shame, she always sings those so softly, you really feel the moment. But oh well, it's a live show, shit happens. The sound overall was REALLY good though in this venue, even though Su was drowned out at times. And I say it while I stood at the front, I imagine it was even better near the sound desk.
However, all this time I was tiptoeing around the biggest highlight of the show for me. The thing that actually made Bangkok a cathartic experience. FUCKING MONOCHROME HOLY SHIT. It's a godlike, transcendental experience. Su sings it with such a passion, the song itself has such a good structure, beautiful melody, gorgeous passionate choreography, it's one of the very best things this band has ever released. A true classic. And live... It's just on another plane of existence. Unity, tranquility, some kind of emotional rebirth, you feel it all. Here's my face right after it finished. I just cried the entire song starting from the first chorus. I've only ever had a cathartic experience of this magnitude once in my life: during the intro to IDZ at LMG-2. And this feeling and memory of hearing Monochrome live for the first time will also be locked firmly in my mind until I die. This is simply inevitable.
Honestly everything just CLICKED for this show. The spontaneity with which I went to the show; availability of VIP tickets which allowed me to be at the front; great venue with amazing sound; absolute FIRE of a setlist, the best in years; unique performance of PA PA YA!!; energy of the crowd (at least where I was); and the band itself which is no doubt on top of their game right now. But what made it click isn't really the combination of all these points, but rather the single and indivisible pile of positive energy they helped to shape inside my soul during this amazing weekend.
I'm now sitting in Bahrain on my layover before flying back home. I feel surprisingly calm and focused. I don't feel like I really need more, and I'm not sad everything is over so quickly. Not at all. I'm just fully charged and feel completely rested and at peace. I want to go back to work, work hard, be better version of myself. And then, hopefully in half a year, I'll see them again. Fingers crossed.
NOTHING I have experienced in this life has EVER affected me emotionally stronger than a BABYMETAL show. I don't know why. Everything inside me just turns upside down, I gasp for air, I want to live, breathe, and experience, sparing no expense whatsoever. We truly live in a greatest of timelines. One in which BABYMETAL, having started as, let's be honest here, a quirky experiment and somewhat of a joke (albeit a really smart one) just stubbornly refuses to fall into obscurity and oblivion, and continues to improve for TWELVE YEARS ALREADY, while having 3 out of 4 founding members still going strong (obviously I include Koba in this equation). And the addition of Momoko as a full member will do wonders for them, I'm absolutely sure of it.
I really wish for everyone to have something in their lives with the same level of emotional engagement as we do with BABYMETAL. The world might become a better place. Otherwise, why would you even wanna live?

Alien-Nation Chapter 168: Now or Never

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Chapter summary: Elias wanders the grounds inspecting everything he can, has a fatheson moment with Larry then sends Vaughn to go try and spring people from jail.
It had been easy for me to see during the speech I'd given roughly how many had already arrived up the narrow pass, and as I stood from inspecting a firing port in a trench, testing whether the old cast iron cannon would roll back far enough on its rails after firing.
I gave it a pass after measuring against a rod. Certainly it was far from the highest of technologies at our disposal, but certainly it would be either lethal, injurious, or at the very least, extremely loud. The gathered mishmashed array of weaponry pointing outward was impressive enough, but the real piece de resistance was the sheer number of railguns we'd had returned to us, frequently carried by a two man team. I signed off on it for final inspection, noting the plug in place over the end, and went to the railgun positioned further down the trench near the intersection.
This was one I recognized. This shared at least something in common to the cannon, insofar as it was far from the latest model at our disposal. I spotted some of my own extremely crude handiwork, a far more rough set of welds performed along the plate's protective, unsanded metal edges. Mister Singer, if he were ever presented with it, may have recognized the shoddy, unstable hand that welded together some of the protective casing. The service flap told me the model without needing to even open it, the household door frame hinges pulled from Verns' stock of spare parts bin, before we implemented something even so basic as refined latches with catch points.
That had to make this a Mk. II. Sentimentality had no place on the front lines. I sucked in a breath at the sight of another old muzzle-loader being carried into the workshop for upgrades, already laid out on the timber worktable and ready for use and sucked in a breath.
I just hoped the earliest design of managing power flow wouldn't give out from the faster firing. Complex but beautifully arrayed piping had given way to simpler, more streamlined designs as we incorporated a greater number of readily available alien parts. Some of which we were supplied an initial batch of in the bag with the blueprints, and then we were told how to work free those same parts from various broken pieces of technology we'd reclaimed off the Shil'vati, or even the freely given away omni-pads. With every iteration we demonstrated a degree of adaptation to using the parts we had available, and each generation marked a leap forward in our own understanding of Shil'vati technology, courtesy of G-Man and his father's handiwork.
The final barrels of the extremely limited run of the second batch we'd paid handsomely for were marked 'present,' too. They had gone the least far afield, with one already slagging itself during the attack on the data center. I frowned at the spreadsheet, as if my impression of it might cause their fate to improve.
The latest blueprints could maintain a decent rate of fire without burning out its power management system located in the welded together case. Or, rather, the barrel gave out first. For the first time, perhaps as a result of being coupled with the magazines and a relatively rapid-fire exchange meant the neosteel barrels we received had finally become the weak point in the design.
It was only after we'd returned to Camp Death that I'd noticed the difference.
The new batch we'd paid dearly for seemed somewhat altered from the first batch we'd been building all the others out of, made from an alloyed material that shone somewhat dimmer under the sun as George and I worked in the shed elbow-to-elbow, though the contrast was not immediately obvious until one held the two against each other. It was slightly thicker, too, all of which to me indicated a change in supply in some manner, but our supplier had hardly announced themselves to Sam.
This was a troubling puzzle to me. I still couldn't be sure it was the new microbatch of barrels alloys being far from equal to the originals we'd finally finished building out? Or was it the expanded magazines and power couplings' ability to fire faster creating an overall volume of fire that overheated the barrel from overuse? Or was the power management design faulty, generating more heat per shot? Were we misusing them?
I measured the barrel of the Mk. II, just to be sure the shelf life of the barrel hadn't come due. So far, inspections of the original batch of barrels had mercifully indicated they'd all been brought back here were in comparatively great shape, with this one being no exception. That lent me some comfort that these new barrels were just not up to the task of heavy, sustained fire. I couldn't know that for certain, and an unreliable weapon was cause for anxiety.
Indeed, there was almost no wear on this version at all, disproving the worst case scenario that these were only good for a certain number of rounds before they'd be worn down to uselessness. Certainly, they'd eventually give out, but it seemed we were still far off from that point.
"Sir?" Asked the gunner, staring at me.
I stared at him, then down at the spreadsheet. "This thing fires three rounds a minute. Do you think that rate of fire is sufficient?"
I could tell he wasn't sure whether a 'no' would have him replaced with someone professing to be more accurate.
"Get it upgraded." I took the white gel pen and scribbled on it- make ready for an upgrade as soon as the final repaired railgun clears the shed. Assigned to casemate #4, Operator... "Call sign?"
"Brut," he answered.
"Brut...with the Umlaut?" He gave a thumbs up and I added them. Costing nothing but a drop of gel ink for a little personalization if it made for a happy gunner was a good investment. "Use it well. Get it upgraded if there's time, keep an eye on the work shed. Once the repairs stop, you can take this to the front of the line, Brüt."
There was no point dismantling all our old ones and creating a backlog while some still needed repairs. I wrote on the hatch Upgrade from Mk. II to Mk. IV. That would give it a magazine and more than triple its firing rate. Anything more than that, I quietly held my doubts for the feasibility of upgrading in a timely manner. The Mark V's took too much time and effort to build their complex power management systems for not enough gain, stuffed too tightly into the protective case to be completed quickly. The Mark VI's tended to overheat their crude fire control circuitry, the consequence of an overcorrection back to simplicity; they could maintain a high fire rate, but were too delicate. The VII's were the ones with the new barrel. Promising, but those barrel faults...I still worried it might have been the power management system.
We'd started considering adding water tanks to help maintain them, but it brought the weight higher than that of a Mk. I, and successfully swapping a boiling hot tank off a delicate, electronically-loaded railgun in combat seemed like a very questionable use of the time. We'd just have to ask the crews manning the railguns to be a bit judicious in our fire, and hope that the flaw was limited to the new little batch of barrels.
How many rounds, exactly, and exactly how fast was yet to be determined; we hadn't conducted the amount of testing a proper military might carry out, but while we had no shortage to man, we also did not have so many as to test dozens until their point of failure, weighing and comparing all their possible conditions.
All this uncertainty kept bouncing around my head. How many troops did we have here? How many rounds for every type of rifle, including the more exotic variants? How reliant on them were we to deal damage, and was it all stored somewhat safely? On the less direct side of things, how many tons of food did we have stored, and was it distributed well? How many thousands of gallons of water could we draw? How many pounds of soap to wash utensils, cups, wounds, and shower with? How many pounds of food over how many men, to last how many days? If it rained, some of these might be alleviated, and yet might kick off a whole host of other issues. There was no way of knowing, no way of taking a perfect stock. But I could estimate.
We had a lot of people. And a lot of guns. And a lot of defenses, and literally countless tons of high explosives, triggered by various means and methods. And we were mad as hell. While exactly how mad was less concrete a figure, I knew this many men away from home could end poorly.
Ultimately, whether it was the fault of the new barrel or the design had finally reached the limitations of its potential rate of fire without causing other issues, I couldn't say for certain. So I had to do my best.
I gave the railgun a clean bill of health to operate if needed, 'priority upgrade,' and noted the rate of fire for the defensive position at 'three a minute.' This one being one of our oldest models, I left it to the operator with my blessings, and made a mental note to add the next railgun we had to be stationed nearby, just so that we weren't under strength from that angle.
I craned my neck from the trench to behold even more insurgents trickling into the old clearing. The arrivals always came in ones-and-twos, their body language telling me the story of the journey it had taken to get here. They'd had to have abandoned their vehicles to the traffic-snarled roads almost certainly some miles away unless they knew the path George and I would occasionally take;.
Those who brought their own heavy weapons lay them down at their feet before collapsing. Water and food was distributed, though I couldn't speak to the quality, and a trash run would have to be made, tossing the empty tins into ammunition containers.
Of all the newcomers who had yet to be organized into place, I counted two mortars, several more volunteers grouping up to retrieve ammo after taking down descriptions of the vehicles from their exhausted owners and sprinting back out into the night to fetch whatever had been left behind.
The resourcefulness lifted my spirits. No one entertained the notion that these men were taking their leave to flee a certain doom. All present felt some degree of faith, understood who they were, why they were here, and what we were setting out to accomplish. Cells worked to find one another in the darkness, congealing themselves into a more coherent, practiced fighting force by virtue of familiarity with one another. Discipline was sharp and needed little enforcement past an initial reminder. No flashlights switched on inside the premises or campfires were lit despite the encroaching edges of the cold front. Insurgents were guided to whatever defensive positions, pillboxes, trenches, battlements, or bunkers still sat empty, depending somewhat on their expected role after detailing their skills to sentries or those otherwise familiar with the camp carefully explaining sight lines and our overall defensive strategy.
Whispered word overheard from those arrivals seemed to indicate a mixture of panic and outrage was fast spreading through the state's populace, carrying them on frightened wings as they took flight in the night, from here to the southernmost beaches and bays. It seemed word had gotten out successfully, then. That knocked down one more obstacle to our success, or at least set the pieces in place. Soon, all that would remain would be the ugly business of following through, and hoping, no praying that I hadn't massively miscalculated in my hubris.
I took the ramp out of the trench so they could pour some loose gravel into it, helping ensure that if those threatening looking storm clouds opened and if the drains clogged, we still would have some footing, and retired to the command cabin, eyeing how empty it felt with all the finished products being set into defensive arrangements; only the workshop still retained all its rather explosive concoctions.
The manpower situation was such that those familiar in reliably manufacturing complex bombs were spending their time setting up defenses in the fields beyond and settling in our new arrivals.
And then I had the couple hostages, weakened by months of captivity, restrained and kept under guard, but still sitting right on top of the half-done armaments.
I told myself that we had taken precautions- the most reactive sets separated by a thin membranous bag of water to prevent chain reactions from taking root and a few emergency containment systems, but they relied on someone present. I'd need all hands on deck- and what if a direct lance of energy landed from some heavy weapon hit the shed, perhaps to try and make a point? No mere bag of water would make a difference then.
Then again, if they brought that king of weaponry to bear, then the outcome would be certain. The Shil'vati would still lose their hostages, and have tacitly admitted I'd forced their hand, and that they'd declared we were enough of a threat to sacrifice noblewomen just to put a stop to.
I hunched over a smaller map in the command cabin, pinning down the garrisons and jails Verns might be held in. Perhaps I'd been premature in my assessment in lacking a future need of a good map when I'd jumped atop the table for my little motivational speech. I'd gotten caught up in the moment; I hadn't foreseen the need for an offensive element.
I was sorely missing my Lieutenants. Vendetta wasn't here, which was one of the greater anxieties weighing on my shoulders.
The one word I'd whispered in his ear all that time ago to bring him around to believing I did, in fact, have a plan: Victory. He should be here already.
He'd sprinted off across the field in glee back when I told him of this plan's possibility, that "Plan C" might come about due to a few cells going dark and my suspicion that it wasn't moles. The null hypothesis, that there were in fact moles, had put him in direct danger by sending him to double-check.
I cursed my blindness. My eagerness to take a night off, to get him out of the way so he wouldn't clash with the others, so I could be a 'normal boy' for a night and attend a party- one I wouldn't be kicked out of, To find social acceptance.
All part of a 'coming of age,' even after I'd already spilt blood, led a war campaign effort, kissed, earned more money than most would see in a lifetime, and mentally cut ties with my family. By almost any account, I already was a man, yet I'd gotten obsessive in imitating the modern trappings of defining such things. I should have seen the cells reporting members' absences and even going dark as a whole for what it was. I could have called off Town Hall, started assembling even more people here.
Then again, if I had, then perhaps...the shil'vati might not have started grabbing everyone. I hated to think of Verns as 'sacrificial.' They likely didn't have much on him, just a neighbor's report. Then again, we'd had that meeting right after the bar fight at Lucky's, right? How thoroughly had George cleared out his house, if they went back to rummage around and investigate? How well could George cover his tracks? We'd left that ammo crate in the hallway, for starters- clumsy of us, yet we were in a panic. Like children. I tensed as I remembered so vividly the sudden sharp report of the gun, watched Patrick's empty eyes stare up. But not children.
There was nothing I could do for Vendetta. We'd sent the Bat Signal out. Either he'd be here, or he'd miss it.
I weighed the value of sending George away once he got here. The order would certainly annoy him after he'd just arrived, something of an arduous task given how far backed up the traffic had become. I also knew it meant I'd have one fewer lieutenant here, where I desperately needed him. I could hardly ask him to burn down the childhood home, and it would certainly reek of hiding evidence.
"Sir," A sentry stood in the door frame, and I stretched from where my muscles had tensed up, pulling my shoulders back and yawning silently beneath my mask, lumbering toward him.
I didn't realize how tall I'd gotten until I realized he was staring up at me and had taken a half-step backwards- not to make way so I could lead from the door, either, but almost defensively.
"Yes, what is it?" I asked, stopping in place.
"We've received a message for you, sir. Radio is reporting that a 'Hex' has checked in from her position. She and Binary report 'Green as Grass,' sir."
I wasn't used to being called 'sir,' and it caught me off guard. I realized he was standing there, waiting for a response from me of some sort, too.
What should I say for him to send back to Hex? I momentarily remembered the sensation of the kiss, the warm, slightly wet softness, the tenderness, and felt a bit of a blush under my mask. While every instinct screamed at me to not air even a hint of my romances or inner turmoil about a kiss over the unencrypted connection, there was a level of 'not talking about it' that I was unfamiliar with and hadn't planned for. Could my message back be coded into something subtle? Nothing came to mind.
"G-good," I finally stuttered a little awkwardly. "That's very good."
"What does it mean, sir?"
I pushed the distractions out of my head. This was no time to be thinking about girls- and my mind stubbornly disobeyed, wandering right back to Natalie. At first to the hug she'd offered me, when I was scared. Frightened of the mind-wiper device. That tenderness she'd offered- I pushed the memory from my mind, too. This wasn't the time to fantasize, either. I had to live in the world that was before me, here in the present. People were relying on me. I could figure out all that other stuff- girls, hope, my future- sometime later.
"It means the operation can proceed as planned."
If the Twins stopped reporting or got caught with the hostages, then we'd have a lot less leverage stopping Azraea from blowing us all sky high. A couple noblewomen- who I wasn't terribly familiar with and seemed to be somewhat less important, provided they were truthful to me of their station. This unfortunate pair had relied on connections to already-stationed family members to arrive, rather than on their raw political power to muscle their way to Earth's then-closely guarded secret coordinates, and were present only for evidence of said hostages' presence.
"Sir, beg your pardon," I could sense something bubbling under his words, against his better judgment, but some sense of desperation demanded he ask me this anyways. "But what is the operation? I've been manning the airwaves with Radio, helping spread word, but everyone I make contact with seems to want to know."
"I don't see the wisdom in broadcasting the finer details of our plan, I'm sure you understand."
I sensed the inner conflict by the way he froze up. He wanted to object, probably, to swear he wouldn't leak more than the minimum. The problem was, anyone listening for long might take a morsel here, a morsel there, and bring it all together and undo us.
"You have all you're meant to have at this point, frustrating though that must be to try and inform others of the going-ons. Our objective is right before us. When the time comes and the enemy appears, blast them." I didn't want to say there isn't much else to plan. At least, not for them to consider.
"And you, sir?"
"I'll be right here, alongside you," I promised. That seemed to ease some of his pressing curiosity, at least. "We'll be here together, to watch the birth of a miracle." That, or we'd die together. Those words didn't quite have the same catchy ring, though.
I looked over my shoulder back at the map. What more good could be wrought over pondering what jail he might be in, without more details?
"Another matter. Hex said G-Man should arrive in a few minutes."
"Thank you. Anything else to report?"
"No sir, the shortwave beckons." They gave a hand-on-heart and stepped out, leaving the doorframe empty.
I told myself I may as well follow. There was no good to come of disappearing into a tent, secluded for long periods, not when anxiety might run through the gathered troops. I had to make myself seen at least periodically. Besides, it was easier to get a more complete picture from out here than in there.
Radio looked like a one-man-band by the way he was surrounded by boxy electronics of varying sizes, their glows dimmed slightly by thin pieces of fabric taped over the tiny glowing screens, and the trap stretched over his head. Wires snaked their way along the ground, a trooper trying to lay the cable into a thin channel of dirt with a spade to reduce the tripping hazard.
Pierce crouched next to him with a laptop plugged into something wired together, the final outlet of which looked vaguely like an international travel inverter, her fingers flying across the trackpad.
"Radio, how are we?"
"We've made lots of contact, I think. So much traffic on the airwaves it's actually hard to find a clear channel to broadcast on."
"Do they have our encryption keys?" I asked, the question almost automatic.
"No, having one kind of defeats the purpose of being heard and getting the signal out. Besides, encrypting's probably easy for the Shil'vati to crack. Less easy for human intelligence agencies, but impossible for the people who we want to hear us."
I already knew most of this, but humoured him. Little entertained radio quite like his namesake.
"What's our chance of discovery, then? Rough time to them figuring out it's us here, and finding the signal's origin."
"At least with a somewhat uncountable number of HAM signals being thrown across the airwaves, we are a really big needle in a gigantic haystack. Besides, how many times have we actually been where we're broadcasting from?"
That was a point I hadn't considered.
The Shil'vati would likely regard our signal as just a relay point, rather than the source, let alone the destination.
Would they strike it just to silence the orders, once they figured out how many of them were originating from the same point?
I comforted myself by staring upstream of the creek that wandered to the south of Camp Death, following its course with my eyes to where it flowed under the concrete tunnels under the highway, under the train tracks, to where it ultimately ran back to where Radio and I had visited Saint Michael's. Then I turned my head back across the field, toward where the foundation of Mojo and Mister Pasta's had been, where Vaughn had called in the kill team on the Fed's sting operation,
We'd certainly set up plenty of remote broadcast towers before, to entice them into launching strikes on collaborationists. That Saint Michael's was still standing after we'd broadcast all kinds of propaganda from there meant they'd almost certainly learned to be a bit more cautious about lashing out blindly.
In the darkness I saw a familiar figure materialize, and with a bit of relief, I ran up to greet Larry. I wanted to give the old mechanic a hug, but knew that expressions of intimacy while standing near the middle of the camp's defensive perimeter in front of everyone was more than a bit inappropriate, and settled for a nod of acknowledgment.
"I cleaned up the mess at Jules place," he said, going back to referring to his friend by their code name, glancing at Pierce.
I felt a moment of shame. We'd panicked and grabbed everything. Perhaps we were like children after all, leaving our toys out and in the hall. "Thank you."
"Saw Patrick."
"Patrick saw," I said back. "Patrick- called."
Whatever Larry was about to say, that brought him up short. "Oh. Oh." The words seemed to leave him pained. He'd known Patrick, too, and I felt the weight of guilt. It seemed he moved on faster than I could, because he changed the topic quickly.
"What's up?" He gestured at the radio setup.
Pierce seemed to be quite engrossed in her work, trying to connect the laptop to a radio via a USB cable, fumbling with the port in the dark. The laptop's screen was showing a shaky handheld video of a mass arrest- and I thought I could hear my own voice echoing the words I'd spoken just a short while ago.
"Just uploading the speech. I've spliced it up to some footage that one of the newcomers brought. We'll also be exporting raw versions of both- just the audio, the video, make sure people have the record and can decide for themselves."
Sometimes the truth was the best propaganda.
"How are you getting video out? I thought the internet was down."
Radio held a hand up, and then put it down, as if I'd been a teacher asking a question and he'd been chasing extra credit. The next few sentences were practically a foreign language to me, uttering a series of numbers in rapid succession, followed by what sounded like a name. That may've been a model, an edition of a model, a make, a special form of broadcasting- all of it may well have been bounced off the ionosphere for how far it went over my head. I wasn't used to being so completely out of my depth, but everyone seems to have specialized in some skill or another. I'd preferred getting involved in all aspects of the revolution, but at a certain point delegation was a necessity, and I was watching not just the task's needs, but also the capabilities of my lieutenants grow well past my ability to offer useful insight and guidance.
"I...see." I didn't, but I wasn't sure what else to say. I wanted to express curiosity, but I felt like this new capability was something we'd discuss later, if there was a later. "And people can receive high definition video over shortwave? It just takes a long time?"
It seemed to me to be an apparently somewhat technical process to perform over shortwave, and only when finally pressed for details, Radio at last admitted something I did understand: "I am not sure most people know how to collect the signal, or have the right equipment to, but I'm sure someone will, Maybe that person will redistribute the videos."
There. Actionable, useful information.
"Then continue," I said. "At least unless anything more pressing jumps up to do."
"Let's hope it's good for more than the history books," Pierce commented mildly.
"The world has to know, and I am certain the shil'vati have no interest in putting such footage out there. That's reason enough for us, isn't it?" I watched Radio nod and then scurry about the camp, tracing one of the wires toward the antenna array nearest the highway. I turned to Larry, breaking off from the amusing spectacle. "Do you remember my promise?" My question was genuine, but he seemed to waver slightly, now that the possibility of actually delivering on it was here and present. Perhaps the aura of our inner circle's invincibility had been shattered with the loss of his neighbors, and it would be best to set his mind to something productive. "If you want it to come true, see to it that the mortar teams are trained. Get the cannons in position, and make sure we're good for more than just one wave."
Larry snapped a salute, fingers on brow, and I clumsily approximated one in return, though I had never done a salute before in my life. I could sense the slight smile from behind his mask, and with a quick check over his shoulder that no one was watching, he reached out, straightened my palm out slightly, then brought the edge of my palm higher until it was a bit more level. "That's better," he judged, then leaving me alone once I dropped the hand a few seconds later.
George showed up a few minutes earlier than Hex had predicted, out of breath and escorted by a sentry. "Ditched the truck," he wheezed. "The huge bags of claymores and equipment were really heavy. Had to haul it under the interstate." His shoes shone with creekwater; He'd almost certainly taken the path Larry had forbade us from trying, and I couldn't imagine doing it in the pitch black darkness at any speed.
I motioned to the sentry. "Help him get that bag into the workshop." He was the best bomb maker, but he also had helped build this place. I wanted to pick his brain, but I would give him time to rest, first.
"Hey, Radio. Radio!" I heard the shortwave radio he'd set at the top squawk to life with a familiar grumble on the other end, distorted somewhat by the tinny speaker. I scooped it up. Someone with a vocoder- Radio gave those out sparingly.
"'E' here," I answered for him, but didn't want to announce myself. Not right away.
A moment's pause.
"What are your orders?"
"Vendetta?" I wanted to confirm.
"I'm here with over fifty people waiting at Warehouse Base for something to do," I knew the transmission would likely be monitored, but the time for subtlety was over. "You're on speakerphone, by the way."
The line was likely tapped, or at least would be intercepted, its contents determining priority for being passed upward or presented to someone with authority, possibly even Azraea herself.
Whatever orders I gave, they'd have to be in code, or at least sound like something unimportant, low-priority so that we might give him as much opportunity to get the drop on the enemy as he could be afforded.
"Don't bother trying to come here yet," I quickly supplied. "By now, if you're not on your way here, you have your own party to go to." I took a moment to survey the grounds. "We've practically got a full house. See about getting a house party of your own, though you'll have to pull the guests out of their own company. Or something to flank."
"Any idea where to start?"
The map fresh in my mind, I found the answer sprang to me.
"There's a rest stop along Route One. If you've got any party poppers, you can get them to open up to you like a can opener. You know, it's all about introducing yourself well."
I heard him laugh mirthlessly, the sound coming through like a cheese grater run over the asphalt.
"That one's a big bite, maybe more than we can chew without choking. Why don't we start with something smaller?"
I wanted to protest, to direct him to the biggest ones first. Then again, how much did they have on Verns? How likely was he to be somewhere heavily defended?
"What do you have in mind?"
"Well, right across the river from where the naughty girls all get sent. Why don't we start there? Every party needs a few ladies, right?" I could hear a roar of assent from the background.
I wasn't quite sure what he meant by that- was he going to try and attack the Shil'vati base? Surely not those women? He wasn't that insane. Then it clicked- the Women's Correctional Facility in Wilmington, just upstream of the Christina River from where he was broadcasting from at the old Warehouse Base. Easy to get to, certainly, and right near the interstate with pedestrian bridges and neighborhoods to scatter in after the strike made it an excellent candidate. Almost certain to succeed.
The strike wouldn't yield us Verns, though forcing the Shil'vati to admit that they couldn't both take and hold their prisoners at the same time might force them to at least pause rounding up ever more people.
If I gave it my blessing, I would be sacrificing any chance of rescuing Verns for...for what? The tradeoff strained my soul to even consider.
"If you feel that's best, you know your crowd. That said, they got Jules- we want him back." He'd helped build Camp Death. He knew its ins and outs, though my real reasons were somewhat sentimental. "Keep an eye out for Morningstar and a few other cells. I've little doubt they can party with the best of them." They were one of my heaviest hitters, routinely bragging they could go clay pigeon hunting with an unguided RPG, yet I was pretty sure I'd never rallied them to Camp Death- if they were to rally, Warehouse Base was where they'd be.
There was a moment of silence, until Vaughn reported back- "Yeah, they're here. They were going to move up to you once they got everyone together. Should we leave instructions for where to find us, or to find you?"
"Do it- supplies are overall good here. Lots of...uh, balloons, confetti..." I felt like I was stretching the analogy too far, so I gave up trying to equate weaponry to party paraphranelia. "...you know, the works. Take Morningstar and use 'em as you see best fit. What've you got for your party? Any good party supplies?" We certainly could make a trash run and see if we could also deliver them some RPGs at the same time.
"Got some Bump-n-Grinds, and you know those are always good for an up-close-and-personal encounter."
I laughed. "From what I read about bumping and grinding? The closer, the better." Their accuracy left a fair bit to be desired. Still, it would be a good, even vital carry just in case those dreaded Security Forces Technicals made an appearance, and would probably be 'good enough' against a stationary target like a wall, especially in the hands of a capable squadron like Talonstar.
"What time are you thinking?"
"I'd say as soon as we're all ready. You really overestimated how many people know where Camp Death is. A fair number showed up here, and are still trickling in."
"Enough to throw several parties at once?" I asked, suddenly hopeful.
"Well, I suppose, maybe, but I'd be wary of partygoers without someone in charge to, uh..." the metaphor seemed to be breaking down, but I got what he was going for.
"Yeah, I see."
"Are you thinking if there are too many noise complaints at once, it'll keep the party going longer?"
"That's part of it, but I'm hoping we might find a particular person we're missing, lost him when we were playing unexpected host. Someone of G-Man's, you'd know him as Jules. A divide and conquer might maximize our odds of finding him."
"Plus, maximize the number of partygoers we pick up as we move. I like it. A few small house parties for every big house. Any special orders?"
"None. K.I.S.S. principle applies. Good, bad, I want it all out on the streets. 'KISS' 'em until they can't see straight." Keep It Simple, Stupid.
"You're certain?" I could hear the hesitancy in his voice. "This is going to be the greatest thing we've ever done, and I want to be by your side for it 'til the end. I don't want any last-minute cancellations, and I sure as hell don't wanna miss it. How long should I party?"
We'd be letting absolute chaos loose. Fire. Looting. The worst of humanity, turned loose, with Vaughn potentially at its head if he decided to recruit for some reason. Could I still claim to be the good guy if I turned those kinds of people free to wreak havoc on the state I claimed whose denizens I was protecting?
Blackstone's Ratio holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. It would still hold me no less accountable for whatever followed from this mass prison break, though.
I looked over to the recently arrived George, and hung my head.
So be it.
"Confirmed, Vendetta. I'll next talk to you when you're here in person- call it when you start either getting tired or if the hosts hire a doorman, a bouncer, or something you can't handle. Bring any good partygoers and favors you find, guide them here, O Pied Piper. Over and out." The signal went quiet again, and I turned off our radio, standing and yawning. The hour was late, and it would be my last opportunity for some shuteye.
I pulled aside a few sentries to my first order. I felt it was a strange one, and likely futile: I asked everyone to 'try and get some rest.'
The sentries were going to be exhausted, and I needed them to start working in shifts if we were to maintain our vigil and perimeter. Doubtless, more would be coming, and giving them at least some rest might be a difference-maker. G-Man helped lead the newcomers to the subterranean bunkers and tunnels, trying to make sure everyone had a place to stay the night and resources got split, even if it was throwing tarps and blankets on hard-packed dirt. I eyed the tunnels, knowing which one of them would spit me out near the stream, itself running so low I might as well refer to it as a ravine. Digging that had been cramped, paranoia-inducing, but we'd dug out so much of the hill and filled it with enough weapons to wage a full-scale war. What had begun as almost make-work and a place to store things when we'd started out
I couldn't sleep well on the cot that night, tossing and turning- I even tried resting with the mask off, held in my hands, but the risk to my identity if anyone barged in caused me enough stress. Eventually, I stood and donned it, making my rounds around the camp, trying to calm myself. Instead, I felt eyes following me, and I had to force myself to stand tall. For the thousandth time, I thought of this as my Valley Forge.
The sentry at the door to the command cabin gave me a hand-on-heart, and I returned it.
As I patrolled, I could hear whispered prayers, muttered plans of action, and mercifully, snores. At least some were getting some sleep. I could see orange lights reflecting off the clouds, near where I knew Wilmington lay.
I almost jumped a foot in the air when I felt the tap on my shoulder, only to find G-Man's mask staring into mine. How strange that such a haunting visage was a comfort to me.
"Hey. Can't sleep?"
"I can't," I confessed. "G-Man, I'm sorry what happened with your father. Hell of a birthday." I hadn't even had a chance to give him the present I'd bought him- a couple new filters, and vintage craftsman toolkit, "from before they sold out," Verns had told me. The memory of his voice already felt distant somehow- no. I'll see him again.
"Wasn't your fault. Even if Town Hall wasn't your big idea to get them to retaliate, you know? Then they'd still have done something. But, uh, thanks for saying that. And thanks for trying to get dad out. I'll remember that." George said quietly, then the conversation ended when he turned away and went to the edge of the embankment. Just like that.
I could never quite get a read on him.
I went inside, and tried to force myself to get at least some shut-eye.
Thanks to Terran-Armored-Core and DeltaNu for helping with some decisions and spellcheck.
Thanks to Inmutabilis-Ratio for helping with the site, it was very helpful in importing the text.
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Alien-Nation Discord Buy A Coffee for the Author

TL;DR Both me (25f) and my partner (26m) betrayed each others trust after he lied in bed and I sexted someone.
Our relationship has been unstable since he lied about using protection whilst I was drunk after I explicitly told him and have always told him that if there’s no condom, there’s no sex. I lost all trust in him and since then things have been a down spiral.
He used this situation to try and fix his mental health, and sort his drinking out. It didn’t work. Once again he went out with friends without telling me and passed out drunk at a mates house. I was up all night worrying, didn’t get any sleep before work. And when I finally got an answer from him at 8am, he was annoyed that I tried to see where he was on FindMyiPhone.
Few days later my cat luna passed away, and he was barely there to support. I wanted to him to come home from work early as I was in a bad place. He didn’t. Instead he left work on wrap and pretty much went to sleep when he got home.
Now I know what I did was horrid last night. I went onto a dating app to feel appreciated and to feel good about the attention I’d get on there. Went out drinking last night and ended up sexting this guy, which my boyfriend found out.
I screwed up, i know.
What do I do. How can we come back from this? I love him and I want to be with him but are we just not compatible?

by Brian Maycock
I joined the vampire coven because I wanted to meet people not because I wanted to drink blood.
And obviously it wasn’t a real vampire coven. It was a bunch of teenagers my age and a bit older who were fond of wearing black clothes and watching movies about bloodsuckers and the rest.
And when I say meet people, I mean, meet girls.
Now that’s all clear, I can tell you what really happened next.
It was a Saturday night and the coven had gathered in the basement of one of our parents’ houses. It was a good set up, with a pool table and bowls crammed full of snacks.
There was a wide screen tv as well and an old series from the 1980s was showing. All the vampires on screen were completely gorgeous.
I stood in a corner eating a handful of chips, wishing I looked like that.
I was short sighted and had acne on my cheeks and chin. I’d hoped as I got older, this would clear up, but every morning there seemed to be a new, angry outburst.
I put the last of the chips in my mouth and pushed my glasses back up. None of the on-screen vampires wore glasses but I could not wear contact lenses without my eyes getting irritated.
Still, at least I had been accepted into the coven despite my complete lack of good-looking.
I’d moved with my folks to the town six months before and if it hadn’t been for the coven my weekends over the long summer break would probably have been totally solitary experiences.
As it was, I got to do things like this.
Things such as grinning at a girl who walked past on her way to get a drink from a bucket that was full of ice and bottles and tins.
In return, she blinked at me – which I took as a win as it was a lot more reaction than I usually got from girls when I dared smile at them.
She was called Beth and she wore a long, flowing black dress, that was carefully torn in places to show glimpses of more black fabric underneath.
With an awful feeling my complexion was flaring red – a long way from the pale skin of one of the cool undead on the widescreen – I went to get some more chips. Comfort eating had always been a thing for me.
With a fresh supply stacked up in my palm, I tried to concentrate on the tv. But it was no use, Beth was chatting to another girl, Jessica. She was wearing her blond hair up in a way that seemed impossibly sophisticated to me.
And as I tried and continued to fail at not staring, Matt breezed up to the girls. He had been picked for the football team at school and deliberately chosen not to play. He had a scar along most of one forearm as a result of a bike accident that had left bone sticking out. He also had stubble rather than the hairy mess that happens when people like me don’t shave. He was sickeningly cool.
Matt said something to Beth and Jessica and they all laughed.
I’d realized early on, that the three of them were the stars, and the dozen other members of the coven were in their orbit.
There were people like them in towns across the country, and people like me.
The only difference was, we were pretending to be a coven.
It sucked.
I looked at the chips in my hand. I wasn’t hungry but I ate them anyway.
Matt, Beth and Jessica were still in their huddle. And I was not the only person who was looking at them.
Amy wore the standard black. Her dress hung just below her knees and she had on black boots that were too big for her.
Like me, she did not look comfortable in her own skin and kept biting her lower lip as she stared over at the coven’s shining stars.
At Matt, anyway. I realized she only had eyes for him.
A girl had never looked at me like that and I felt an all too familiar sadness begin to overwhelm me.
Beth and Jessica meanwhile must have noticed the other girl making eyes at Matt and they gave her a look then leant in towards each other laughed.
From the smug look on his face, Matt knew exactly what was going on as well.
He gave Beth and Jessica a conspiratorial smile and headed over to the other girl.
I could see her cheeks colouring as he came closer and overheard him say, “Hey, we were thinking about getting out of lame central and doing something properly vampiric. Would you like to come along?”
A smile lit up her face and she nodded then followed Matt as he strolled back to Beth and Jessica. Their eyes shone with amusement.
I lifted my hand to my mouth and remembered I had no crisps left at the same moment I realized Beth was looking at me.
“Hey, Brad,” she said, “You want to come with us as well?”
I wanted to tell her that my name was Jeff not Brad. That I was perfectly happy eating chips and watching an old tv series, and that I could see right through her and knew what a shallow person she was really.
But I did none of these things.
I gulped and said, “Yes.”
Because she was beautiful.
I followed the four of them outside. Matt’s car gleamed under a streetlamp. He popped the lock then opened the passenger seat door and held it open.
I was surprised that neither Beth nor Jessica tried to get in. Instead, they climbed in the back seat.
Surely Matt wasn’t holding open the front door for me? I thought.
Amy glanced at me, and I could tell she was thinking exactly the same thing.
“My lady,” Matt said and indicated with a sweep of his hand that, yes, he was waiting for Amy to get in next to him.
She was shaking a little bit as she moved towards the car and got in.
If I could see it, so could Matt. And no doubt Beth and Jessica had as well and they were finding it hilarious.
I looked over at them and the space that was left in the back for me and forgot about Amy. I would be sitting next to them.
My legs felt like jelly as I got in. My right leg was very close to touching Beth’s left leg. There was no way it could not be.
And as Matt started the car and we set off all I was painfully aware that if I so much as twitched I would touch Beth.
It was intense, and it immediately got much worse.
Sitting so close to Beth and Jessica I began to smell their perfume – if it was perfume? Maybe it was just shower-gel and shampoo?
I had no idea, but it was the most amazing, overwhelming fragrance.
I started to shake then, as if someone was running an electric current through me.
And the inevitable happened. My leg touched Beth’s.
“Sorry,” I said in a hoarse voice.
Beth ignored me in a way that yelled, I am ignoring you loser.
I had to endure this until the car slowed to a halt. I climbed out and looked around, and was surprised to see we were parked in the graveyard on the edge of town. While I was standing there staring, Beth and Jessica linked arms and walked off. And Matt took Amy’s hand and led her after them.
Amy looked totally besotted and I imagined she felt like she was floating on air as they weaved their way in between the headstones.
By the dates on some of the headstones, I could tell we were in an old area of the graveyard and I could make out the dates on some of the headstones. The loved ones who were buried there had departed this mortal coil more than a hundred years before.
Some inscriptions I glanced at as I followed the others were too faded to read. There were a few broken headstones as well and the lamps which illuminated the grounds of the graveyard were growing further apart.
I could just about make out Matt, Amy, Beth and Jessica ahead of me. They were approaching a stone mausoleum.
I had no idea what they were doing and a part of me was thinking I should leave them to it. But, it was a long walk back to my house, and I had the fear.
The fear of missing out.
Cursing myself, I hurried to catch up – and did, just in time to see them entering the mausoleum through a wide crack in the wall.
My heart beating like crazy, I followed.
It was pitch black inside and colder than outside. A shiver passed through me. Then I saw a flame flicker into life. And another.
I could see Jessica leaning over a candle and the glint of a lighter in her hand. This candle lit, she moved onto another one.
I blinked and rubbed my eyes as the space I was in became visible.
As well as six slim candles in ornate holders there were symbols spray painted on the wall, scarlet-coloured swirls and intersecting lines that made me think uncomfortably of dark magic. Of dangerous secrets.
Jessica and Beth were by now standing side by side and Matt now had his arm draped over Amy’s shoulders. Her head was resting against his chest and her eyes were half closed in a happy daze.
Beth looked at me and a smile I could not read played across her lips. “Welcome to the lair,” she said. “Where the coven gathers. The actual coven, not the immature fools who pretend.”
“We are the coven,” Jessica said.
“We are the coven,” Matt echoed.
“We are the undead,” Beth went on. “The undead who must follow the ancient rules. Fear the light of day, for it will burn through skin and bone and reduce us to dust. Drink only blood for sustenance, all else is impure. Do not enter unless invited, then we may feed.”
“The undead,” Jessica whispered.
And once again Matt echoed her words.
My mind raced. I was horrified and fascinated. Did they truly believe this?
These three golden students who had successful futures stretching out before them.
Or where they playing a game?
I thought it was this last, surely it must have been – until Beth took a dagger out from within the folds of her dress.
She held it up. It was slim and looked incredibly sharp.
I was transfixed by it until I became aware Beth was moving towards me.
Close enough to hold the blade gently against my neck. “I will open your vein now,” she said, “And drink your blood.”
A tear ran down my face as a cold wave of fear passed through me.
I did not want this. I did not want to be a vampire, or a vampire’s prey.
Beth pressed the blade harder against me and I felt a point of pain begin to burn.
I wanted to move, to run away, but terror held me.
“Don’t,” I managed to say. “Please. Don’t.”
Beth tilted her head to one side and sneered. “Pathetic,” she said, her voice heavy with scorn.
Then she turned her back on me and approached Matt. He still had Amy close, and she was looking up at him in confusion. He put a finger on her lips, just before Beth placed the blade against his neck.
And cut.
Blood began to flow from his skin.
Somehow, Matt did not even wince. He looked into Amy’s eyes and said, “Drink. Show that you want to be with me as one of the undead by feasting on my blood.”
All the colour had drained from Amy’s cheeks but I could tell from her expression that she would do anything for him. For love.
She reached up and placed her lips against his bleeding neck and began to drink.
I couldn’t watch anymore and staggered backwards, and out of the mausoleum.
Then, without thinking what I was doing, I started walking.
After twenty minutes, I tried to order a cab, but my phone was out of credit, so I had no choice but to trudge on.
By the time I did get home, I was exhausted and my feet were killing me. I dragged myself to my room and fell into bed fully clothed.
The next day, I did not get up until after noon. When I went down to the kitchen, my parents were packing.
They were both academics and were going away for almost a month to a conference in Europe, leaving me on my own in the house.
I had been planning to invite the coven round for one of the next Saturday gatherings, but after the events of last night, I had had enough of all things vampire.
Ten minutes later I was standing on the front door step waving my parents goodbye.
When their cab was out of sight, I went back in, closed the door behind me and slumped down onto a sofa.
My plans were to watch tv and work my way through the well-stocked fridge. I clicked the tv on. There was a show about a time travelling pathologist just starting.
I stared at the screen and tried not to think.
I lost days and nights like this. I trudged between the sofa and the fridge and fell asleep then started all over again. The shows soon blurred into one and I was surrounded by crumbs. It was slob central.
Then, one night, while I was flicking through the channels and snacking, someone knocked on the door.
I had no idea who it could have been at that hour and did not answer at first, hoping they would go away.
But the knocking continued, a slow, heavy tap.
I sighed and got up and went to see who it was.
I was shocked when I saw Amy standing there when I opened the door.
Her eyes were red and her cheeks were wet with tears. She said in a shaky voice, “Matt has told me he wants nothing more to do with me. I think it’s Beth and Jessica’s fault. They hate me. But I need him. I need him so much.”
Fresh tears began to run down her face.
I had no idea how to talk to girls at the best of times. I was completely lost about what to do when confronted with a distraught girl, but I had to say something.
“Do you want to watch tv here,” I told her. “Or I could walk you home.”
Still sobbing, she said, “No. Please invite me in.”
I did not understand and just looked at her.
“Please,” she went on, begging now. “Please invite me in so I can feed.”
Suddenly it clicked. I remembered the rules Beth had invoked and realized with horror that Amy wanted to drink my blood.
“I c… can’t,” I managed to say. I was appalled.
She looked up at me. I could see the desperation in her eyes when she said, “I have not fed since Matt rejected me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. Then I closed the door in her face and stood there feeling sick. I waited for Amy to knock again but there was only silence.
After a while I went back into the lounge and sat there trying to understand.
The best I could work out after a sleepless night was that Amy had lost her way. In her blind love for Matt she believed that the rules of the undead Beth had spouted were real.
I felt bad for her, but I did not think there was anything I could do apart from hope she got over things soon.
Two weeks later, I found out on social media that Amy had died. There was a lot of gossip, a lot of nonsense, but as far as I could work out the facts were: She was eighteen years old. She had suffered organ failure after isolating herself and not eating or drinking anything for around ten days. The human body can go without food for quite a long time but not liquids. She had been admitted to hospital, but too late. She was to be buried in a few days’ time and her family had asked for donations to be made to a charity.
I was devastated and kept going back to that night she had come round and I had not invited her in.
I should have been braver, I knew. I should have been open-minded and accepting of the young woman who had asked me to give her what she needed.
I could have saved her. But I had failed.
I sank into depression. I would have done anything to make amends.
Last night, my chance came.
Last night, there was a knock on my door.
I went to answer it and saw it was her.
Amy.
She had returned from the grave. Her skin was pale, her smile hesitant. She was hideous and beautiful. Corrupted and innocent.
I did not waver this time. I invited her in, and she fed on me. It was the most incredible feeling.
She left me before dawn. I sat there for a long time crying.
Tonight, when she returns, I will tell her I want to become like her.
People such as Matt and Beth and Jessica will never understand because, for all their pretence, they are creatures of the light.
But I understand now.
I will follow the rules because they are real.
I will become one of the true undead and be with Amy.
We will be two lost souls together in the eternal night.

Hello all. I have written here before about my job at Ultima Resort (1,2,3,4,5,6,7), though I know it has been a while, sorry about that. We were trapped for some time, my phone died pretty quickly, and I wasn’t able to recharge it again until the water receded. So, I haven’t really been able to write. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me get you up to date, then it will all make more sense.
I opened a door and peered into the closet, but the noise was quieter here, if anything. I shut the closet and continued down the hallway. The dripping had started out intermittent. The gentle plip, plip, plip was barely audible over the normal sounds of the hotel, and we had assumed it was related to the steady rain that had been drumming on the building for a few days, at that point. But the frequency of the dripping had been increasing steadily, and now was concerningly loud and constant. It was somehow audible from every corner of the hotel, and it was only a matter of time until the guests complained. They were already irritable because of the bad weather, which had kept them stuck indoors. As I passed a window, a flash of lightning lit the forest behind the hotel. The lights flickered ominously but it stayed on. The clap of thunder rattled the doors in their frames. I spotted Vincent hurrying towards me from down the hall. His face seemed pale.
“Well, did you find the leak?” I asked.
“Umm… you could say that,” he replied, uncomfortably, eyes shifting to the storm outside.
“What’s wrong?”
“It… well, you should just come see.”
I followed him down the hall to the ballroom where we had hosted the anniversary party some days back. It had been a nice event. Less deaths than I had expected. The hors d’oeuvres were pretty good. There was still a bit of smoke damage on the west wall, but we had cleaned it off as best as we could and the place looked presentable again, though I was now thinking we should put on a new coat of paint. It was hard to decide, when I wasn’t sure if the room would even be here next week. Vincent opened the door on the back wall and gestured me inside. This was new.
It was some sort of small storage cupboard, with dim lighting and a low ceiling. It was full of what looked like furniture, draped in white cloths for storage. I wondered what the furniture was made of, because the room had a strange fetid odor, that reminded me of rot and death. I covered my nose with my hand instinctively, but it did little to help. The small window in the back showed that the rain continued to fall outside, but it didn’t seem to be the source of the leak, as the floor around it was dry. Still, the leak must be in here, because the sound was louder than ever. I took a step forward, to get a better look at the room, but Vincent grabbed my arm and pulled me back, pointing towards the ceiling. I looked up to see a large dome light. It had a strange dark tint, and hardly any light made it through. But something else was coming from the dome. Drips fell in a steady rhythm, and as my eyes tracked them, I saw them splash into a widening puddle on the ground. The puddle was viscous and black, glimmering in the dim light. I looked back at Vincent.
“What is that?” I raised an eyebrow. “It doesn’t really look like ordinary water to me.”
“I don’t know. Maybe… it is picking something up as it drips through from the roof?” he did not sound particularly convincing.
“Maybe,” I tried to play along. “Though, I am not sure I want to know what that could be. Did you check if it is coming from somewhere upstairs?”
“Yeah. Nothing out of the ordinary on the floor above, and I can’t find any signs of a leak anywhere else.”
“Alright,” I backed out of the door and closed it behind us. “Well, I am sure whatever that is will work itself out.”
“What? We’re just going to leave it? Why did we even bother looking, then?” Vincent protested.
“I was worried it was a roof leak, something we needed to handle with routine maintenance. That does not seem to be the case,” I raised a questioning eyebrow. “Do you know how to fix whatever is going on in there?”
“No…”
“Me neither. In this place, when the ceiling is dripping black ichor, it is probably for a reason. I assume we’ll find out when one of our guests gets involved.”
Vincent opened his mouth, as if to protest, but even as he did, the sound of the phone at the desk echoed through the hotel. Vincent sighed,
“Alright, let’s go see what fresh hell awaits us today.”
I heard a small chuckle inside my head. I resisted the urge to ask Al what he knew. He answers were rarely helpful. He didn’t seem to lie, but he was often intentionally misleading, saying whatever he thought would elicit the most drama. I was tired of giving him the satisfaction. I was sure I could sense his disappointment when I refused to engage, but maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. I couldn’t blame Vincent for being apprehensive about what the guests’ inquiry might be. The three men had arrived to participate in some sort of golf event, but they been here for 3 days now and since it had poured every moment, the event was not taking place. The guests were very unhappy about this turn of events, and they had mostly been killing time by taking it out on us. That wasn’t exactly a surprise. The rich ones were always the most demanding, unused to being told ‘no’ even when the question was ‘has the rain stopped yet?’, and based on the Bugatti they had arrived in, these men were quite rich. I answered the phone on the desk, already suppressing a sigh.
“Ultima Resort, front desk, how can I help you?”
“You can come and open the bar,” the voice on the other end snapped. “It’s past noon and the sign says it should be available by now.”
“I apologize, sir. I’ll be right there.”
“You had better be. The service at this place is frankly astounding. Honestly, I don’t understand why anyone ever stays here. I have half a mind to leave a review warning people away.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I know your stay hasn’t been ideal, but please bear with us and we will do everything we can to make it right.”
“You can start by hanging up the phone and getting me my drink.”
The line went dead in my hand. I sighed and replaced the phone on the cradle.
“Let me guess, they wanted to give us a large tip and leave early?”
“Don’t quit your day job,” I chuckled. “You wouldn’t make it as a psychic. Come on, let’s go open the bar, before we have a mutiny on our hands.”
I grabbed the key to open the shutters from the desk and we headed into the dining room. Our three guests were standing around the locked bar, making a show of checking their watches. I struggled to keep my eyes from rolling. It was 12:03pm.
“You know,” Jack turned to the man next to him, but spoke loudly enough to be sure I could hear. “This reminds me of some of the dumps we stayed in before we made our fortune, you know? The little rat trap motels in the port towns we had to stay in.”
“The customer service certainly leaves something to be desired, for a 5-star resort,” his companion, Stewart, sniffed. “For the amount we are paying, I would expect better.”
I turned the lock, opening the bar. I let them vent; I didn’t particularly care if they left us a bad review, and I certainly couldn’t do anything with a good tip, so they were free to hate it here if they wanted. It mattered less to me than they could possibly imagine.
“Can you both hear that leak from your rooms?” the final man, Lesley, asked.
“Can we? I swear it is audible from everywhere in the hotel. There must be a dozen leaks in this old roof,” Jack laughed.
“It would explain that,” Stewart gestured to wet stain on the carpet across the room, oozing out from under a door I didn’t remember being there yesterday.
I glanced over to Vincent, he shrugged,
“I guess we’ve got a new connection to the ballroom. That’s kind of handy,” he said quietly to me, stepping behind the bar and reaching for the rum to pour; it was all they ever ordered.
“That’s another thing that reminds me of the old days,” Jack elbowed Lesley. “You would think a landlocked hotel would be drier than a yacht, but here we are. Maybe you should get out a mop, see if you remember how, Les.”
Lesley stiffened,
“I don’t do menial labor anymore, Cap.”
“Of course, of course,” Jack clapped Les on the shoulder. “Just a joke, mate. The usual, my good man,” he smiled at Vincent, who began pouring drinks.
As day transitioned into evening, I left the dining room in search of absorbent material, to put down on the leak that was spreading persistently into the dining room. I found some cat litter in a back closet, and it seemed like it would do, for now, so I returned and began spreading it over the growing stain. Jack at the bar looked up blearily, watching my work, before finally declaring,
“Oh, so it’s shit, then. That would at least explain the smell.”
“I think it smells more like a rotting carcass,” Stewart interjected.
He had a point there. Maybe I should get some baking soda from the kitchen.
“You know what?” Jack concluded. “Let’s get this next bottle to go. We’ll take it to our rooms for the night. I can’t stand the smell down here another minute.”
He grabbed the bottle from the bar, then he rose and led his friends out of the dining room. I couldn’t say I was sorry to see them go. Vincent circled out from around the bar and approached the soggy patch on the floor.
“So, is that the storage room?”
Now that we were alone, I risked turning the knob and I opened the door to see the same storage room we had entered earlier, though now the light fixture was pouring dark liquid onto the floor, the drip having turned into a deluge. I slammed the door again.
“Maybe we should get Manny,” I concluded.
Manny stood back, watching the ichor pour down like a waterfall. It was pooling around our shoes now, even standing outside the doorframe. He stroked his chin,
“How long has it been like this?”
“I don’t know,” I frowned. “It’s certainly sped up since we found it several hours ago. Any idea how we stop it?”
Manny closed his eyes for a moment, then frowned.
“I think, perhaps, that we should move the food and water from the kitchen, so they don’t get spoiled.”
“Move them where?” Vincent asked.
“To the top floor storage closet. It’ll be safest there. Come help me gather things up.”
“What, exactly, do you think is going to happen?” I raised an eyebrow.
“Let’s just get to work, we probably don’t have much time.”
Manny turned and strode into the kitchen. Vincent hung back and tapped my shoulder,
“What does he know that we don’t?”
“I have no idea, honestly,” I shrugged, and Vincent headed off towards the kitchen. “Do you know?”
I kept my voice low, so the others didn’t hear.
Oh, are you speaking to me now? Al sniffed.
“Depends, are you going to say anything useful?”
Perhaps for a…
“If you say ‘for a price’ we can go back to not talking. I am not trading anything for this.”
I think you will find I am much more helpful if you are willing to make a trade.
“I categorically disagree with that statement.”
Fine, I could feel him scowling. I can give you a hint for free. Maybe try asking yourself what he’s hiding from you?
“Your free hint is that he is keeping secrets?” I raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that true of all of us? That isn’t exactly helpful.”
Well then, perhaps you would like to make a trade?
“Why do I even bother?” I sighed and headed into the kitchen to join the others.
Vincent was helping Manny load food onto a rolling cart. The Chef was, fortunately, nowhere in sight.
“Grab another cart and start loading the soft drinks and bottled water onto it. We don’t have much time before we need to be in our rooms,” Manny instructed.
I heaved a case of bottled water onto the cart, and we all got to work. By the time we made the final trip the carpet in the hall squished under my feet, oozing dark, foul-smelling liquid. It was coming in fast, now. Manny was probably right; we wouldn’t want the food supplies getting contaminated with… whatever this was. After he finished stacking the last bag of rice in the closet, Manny closed the door and turned the key in the lock.
“Well, we should find our rooms. It is getting late, and I doubt they will be in their usual place.”
As he turned to walk away, I noticed blood dripping down from his fingers onto the carpet.
“Manny, wait, your arm,” I pulled up his sleeve to reveal a thin, but deep cut running up his forearm. “What happened? Are you alright?”
Manny yanked his arm away,
“It’s nothing. I must have scraped it moving a box.”
It didn’t look like a scrape. It looked clean, with sharp edges, like a knife wound. But before I could say anything more, he was gone, disappearing down one of the halls.
“You ever wonder about him?” Vincent asked.
“Wonder what?”
“What his deal is. Come on, don’t play dumb. You’ve noticed how strange he can be. How he seems to know things about this place he shouldn’t. Surely, you’ve considered that he might be… one of them.”
“One of them?”
“You know, one of the things that run this place, like the Chef. A demon.”
“Manny? No, that’s ridiculous.”
“Why? He was here before you, maybe he was always here.”
“He is nothing like the Chef or the Masseur. It’s obvious that he is a person.”
“Is it? Maybe that’s just another trick. Maybe he is here to torment us, to steer us wrong.”
I shook my head,
“No, he’s helped us, helped me, many times. It’s impossible.”
“Alright,” Vincent shrugged. “But I have a bad feeling about this one, Lucy. Something about that… water. It isn’t right.”
“You always have a bad feeling. Come on, it’s time to get to sleep.”
“Right. See you tomorrow.”
However he knew, Manny was right. I found my room on the 2nd floor, in a back hallway. Since it wasn’t in its usual place, it took longer to find, but I did manage it before the deadline and locked myself in. Somehow, I could still hear the sound of flowing water, though. I could hear it everywhere in the hotel, in fact. In a way, it was soothing, people liked the sound of flowing water, right? So, keeping that in mind, I allowed it to lull me to sleep.
The morning arrived without fanfare, or a discernable difference in the light coming in through the windows. The storm continued to rage outside, and the clouds were so thick and dark that it was impossible to tell that dawn had broken. Still, my watch told me that day had arrived and so I left the room prepared to mop up whatever water had pooled downstairs and try to serve breakfast. No food had appeared in my room last night, so breakfast sounded very appealing. At least I could sneak a muffin or something. As I arrived at the stairs, I saw Manny standing on the landing, gazing down at the lobby.
“Is the mess bad?” I asked.
“You could say that,” Manny didn’t turn as I approached.
I reached the railing and gasped. The lobby was gone. The whole first floor was gone. All I could see was dark water, lapping against the stairs.
“How is that possible?”
“That’s not really a relevant question, in this place,” Manny noted. “Let’s just call it a flash flood.”
I jogged over to look out one of the windows, lightning flashed, illuminating an alien view, the lawn and garden were also gone. The only thing in sight was a sea of dark water, with the occasional tree protruding from the surface.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“What we always do. Vincent has headed upstairs to lay out some food. We can help him, then lock up the rest and go clean rooms.”
“And if the water keeps rising?”
“We keep moving up the floors, I suppose.”
I stepped down the stairs until I was next to the water, and reached out a hand to touch the surface, wanting to test its temperature and texture.
Stop!
I froze in place, hand hovering above the liquid, the command so urgent I couldn’t ignore it. Trying to act casually, I rose and headed back up the stairs,
“Alright, I’ll go help with breakfast. Maybe we should put up a sign directing the guests to the 5th floor?”
“I’ll handle that. We will have to ration the food carefully; we don’t know how long we will need to make it last. Whatever you do, don’t show the guests where the food is locked up, and only bring out enough for us to have a small meal.”
“Right,” I nodded. “See you up there.”
I turned and headed up the stairs. I waited until I was out of earshot to ask,
“Ok, what was that about?”
Do not touch the water.
“Yes, I gathered that. Why?”
Because you belong to me. And I need you alive.
“What is the deal with that water, exactly?”
But only silence answered. He was done volunteering things for the moment, apparently. I sighed and continued up the stairs. Vincent was waiting for me on the fifth floor, hovering by the landing, looking down over the dark, gleaming surface of the new lake below.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” he asked as I reached the top of the stairs.
“Nope, this is a new one.”
“I wonder if this is what being on the Titanic felt like?” he mused. “Water rising, nowhere to go, just waiting for the end.”
“We aren’t on a ship, though.”
“No. Does that make it better, or worse?”
I shrugged and Vincent passed me a bagel,
“I figure we should eat the breads first; they’ll go moldy in this humidity. We can save the rice, potatoes, and canned goods for later.”
“Makes sense. Do we have a way to cook any of those things?”
“I looked around. Some of the rooms have fireplaces, I guess we can hang a pot over the fire, cook that way. But maybe all this will stop before we get to that point.”
“Maybe,” I wasn’t exactly feeling optimistic about it.
I helped Vincent lay out some fruit and soft breads on the hall table, so that when the guests awoke, they would have something to eat.
“What exactly are we going to tell them when they get here?” Vincent asked, putting out some bowls. “We can’t exactly say that the hotel is sinking and it’s all perfectly normal, can we?”
“What else is there to say?” I shrugged. “It’s some sort of flood. We don’t know any more than they do. It’s the truth, right?”
He considered that for a moment, then nodded.
“I suppose it is.”
A sudden commotion from downstairs drew us to the railing. The three guests were standing on the 2nd floor landing, looking down at the water, Manny was saying something I couldn’t quite hear, but the response was clear enough,
“What do you mean, underwater!” Steward shouted. “This hotel is on dry land. We specifically avoided anything near the ocean or any major body of water. Where did all this even come from?”
“We are located on a flood plain. It is possible that the dam broke upstream,” Manny explained calmly.
Dam, huh? That wasn’t a bad explanation.
“If that is true, where are the authorities, shouldn’t someone be here to evacuate us?”
“I am sure they will be here when they can. Until then, we just need to stay calm and safe. There is breakfast laid out on the 5th floor, please stay away from the water and we will relocate your rooms to the upper floors.”
The trio of men grumbled, but eventually they headed up the stairs. Vincent and I ducked back to our places. As they grabbed fruit from the table, Lesley scowled,
“I told you we should have left days ago. We could have moved to another hotel. Now we’re trapped here, in this dump.”
“Oh, relax, Les,” Jack chuckled. “We’ve been in worse scrapes before. This isn’t a big deal.”
“And if the water keeps rising?”
“I bet we could manage to make a passable raft, eh Stewart?”
Both men chuckled, sharing a private joke, but Lesley still looked anxious.
“I didn’t ever want to be out on the water again. We agreed.”
“Seriously, Les, just keep it together, alright? Let’s just eat something and find some way to kill time. I am sure the authorities will send a rescue crew and we’ll be out of here in no time.”
I opened the storage closet and felt my heart sink as I looked on the nearly empty room. We were down to only a couple of boxes of crackers and a few bottles of water. We had rationed the food carefully, but it had been over 2 weeks now, and we had almost exhausted our supply. I wasn’t looking forward to telling the others. Things had been getting tense. The power went out on the third day, and by now every cellphone we had was dead. Not that anyone could get a signal before that, anyway. The water had risen all the way to the fifth floor, so we were all trapped together on the top floor of the hotel, with nowhere else to go, if it rose any further. The guests had mostly given up hope for rescue, and the rest of us knew that was never a hope to begin with. So, now it looked like the six of us were just going to be trapped up here to starve, if we didn’t drown first. I covered my face with my hands.
“That bad, huh?”
“Vincent. No, it’s… it’s not…” what was the point in lying about it? “Yeah, it’s that bad. We are almost out of food, and the water has risen at least another foot since yesterday.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I have no idea. Let’s just get back to the group. We shouldn’t leave Manny alone, in case the guests come out of their rooms.”
“Right.”
We walked back to the central hallway together. As we entered the room, I saw Manny with his back to us, removing a soaked shirt. Even in the dim light, it was clear that his back was webbed with dozens of scars and cuts. Vincent cleared his throat and Manny hurriedly tugged on a dry shirt.
“I patched the hole in the roof,” he explained. “The rain should stop getting in from there, at least. And I brought down a full barrel of rainwater and replaced it with an empty one.”
“Thank you, Manny. At least the water from the sky is… normal. Because we are going to have to start drinking that water from time now on, I think.”
“And the food?” Manny asked.
“Some crackers, nothing more.”
“Well, I guess we will all need to tighten our belts, then.”
A moment of heavy silence passed between us, before a door burst open and Jack emerged.
“Where’s the food?” he barked. “We’re hungry and the table is bare.”
“Food’s gone,” Manny replied coolly. “There is water in the barrel, to take the edge off.”
“We can’t survive on only water.”
“We can, for another couple of weeks.”
“So that is your plan, to slowly starve to death?”
Manny shrugged but didn’t reply.
“Well, suit yourselves, I have a better plan.”
Jack turned on his heel and stormed out.
“What do you think they will do?” Vincent asked.
“He said already, didn’t he? Build a raft,” Manny replied.
“Maybe that isn’t a bad idea,” I offered. “We could help, try to get out of here?”
“Has attempting to leave ever worked?” Manny asked. “No, all we can do is hunker down until this resolves itself. And I don’t think going out on that water is a good idea.”
“Should we try to stop them, then?”
“No. If they are focused on building, it will keep them off our backs, for the time being. Let them do what they want.”
Vincent and I spent the next few days watching the three men lash together furniture using heavy objects as improvised hammers and strips of torn bed linens as ropes. They seemed to actually have some idea of what they were doing, and they quickly fell into a rhythm, with Stewart and Jack doing most of the planning and construction and Lesley being ordered to fetch supplies and carry heavy objects. He grumbled about it, but did what they told him. They mostly didn’t even notice we were there, as long as we made a show of occupying ourselves with some cleaning task or another. They never even bothered to ask why we were still cleaning and maintaining a flooded, sinking hotel all day. It was hard to tell if they just paid so little attention to us that they didn’t notice, or if they simply figured it was our way of coping with the situation. Occasionally, they would ask us for some material they needed but could not find, and we would help as much as we could, then they would go back to ignoring us. On the third day, when the raft was beginning to look seaworthy, Jack sat back on his heels, admiring their handiwork.
“Well, boys? What do you think? Will it float?”
Stewart rubbed his nose with his thumb,
“I think it’s as fine a vessel as we have ever crewed, captain.”
Jack laughed,
“And you thought we had left those days behind us for good, eh chief?”
“They are. But it looks like it will come in handy for us, one more time. Good luck, huh?”
“Good luck?” Lesley’s face turned dark; he had been increasingly dour over the last few days. “I don’t see the good luck in any of this. I think we are reaping our just reward.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Les, this flood has nothing to do with us.”
“No? You think all this is normal, then? It’s been raining nonstop for weeks, the water keeps rising, no one has come looking for us. It’s like…” he hesitated before continuing. “It’s like we are alone in our own private hell. Just us and dark water everywhere. I don’t know how you aren’t thinking about it. I can’t stop. I see his face whenever I close my eyes. I see the dark puddle in the bottom of the lifeboat. Maybe this is what we deserve.”
Jack backhanded him across the face,
“Pull yourself together, swabbie. And don’t speak again until you’ve regained your composure,” he turned back to Stewart. “Now, we need to get this to the roof before we finish lashing it together, or it won’t fit. Then, we can either find a way to launch it, or we can wait until the water rises enough, what do you think, Mr. Stewart?”
“Well, captain, I say we rig up some ropes to lower it, because if we wait until the water is that high and anything goes wrong, we won’t have another chance.”
“Very good. Alright, Les, help us lift these pieces.”
The raft was relocated to the roof and the next 3 days were spent lashing it together and making the ropes strong enough to lower it the ever-dwindling distance into the dark water. When they were finally ready to launch, Vincent, Manny and I gathered on the roof to watch. I had to admit, I was really beginning to hope they succeeded, even if it didn’t seem likely. We were still rationing out the last few crackers, but three or four crackers a day did little to even take the edge off of the hunger, which gnawed on my guts like an animal. If this didn’t work, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. I looked over at Manny, his face grim and starting to look a little gaunt. As he turned to face me, I saw blood coating his neck and seeping into his shirt collar from a cut near his ear.
“You’re bleeding.”
He reached up and touched his neck, bringing his hand aways stained crimson,
“Shaving cut,” he offered, wiping it off absently with his hand.
I raised an eyebrow, but let it go. I had noticed Manny with little cuts or scars before, but he was always doing landscaping work or maintenance, so small cuts and injuries didn’t seem unusual. But suddenly, in such close quarters and confined indoors, it was apparent that he seemed to injure himself more than I would expect.
Curious, isn’t it? Al asked, speaking up for the first time in sometime.
“You have something to tell me?” I mumbled under my breath.
No, just noting that there is power in blood. I wonder what he uses it for?
Power, huh? That was probably worth thinking about. Later. For now, my attention was drawn to the makeshift ropes lowering the raft into the water. The raft settled into the water with barely a ripple, the liquid was entirely too thick and seemed to stick to the wood like oil, and the sound when it hit was less a splash and more of a splat. The three men looked at each other, confusion and concern on their faces.
“That doesn’t much seem like normal water, Cap’n,” Lesley noted.
“Probably lots of mud and silt mixed in, it’s nothing,” Jack waved away the concern. “Get down there and then you can help us down.”
Lesley shook his head, mutely.
“Fine, Stewart?”
The other man didn’t look happy about it, but he nodded apprehensively and moved to the edge of the roof and clambered down onto the raft. As it bucked and shifted under his weight, he lay down, waiting for it to stabilize, but instead, the rolling and pitching seemed to increase. Then, from the water under the boat came dozens of pale human hands. They were terribly bloated and marbled with green and grey. Corpse hands. Stewart looked down, terror written plainly on his face.
“No! It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t cause it,” he shouted at the corpses looming under him in the dark water. “You want the captain, not me!”
If that was meant to mollify them, it didn’t work. The hands gripped the wood and pulled, capsizing the raft and pitching Stewart into the water. He screamed as he hit the surface. Not just from fear, but pain. He tried clinging to flipped raft, but hands wrapped around his torso, trying to pull him into the dark. I could swear I heard whispers rising from the surface: Join us.
“Help me, please!” he cried.
He was too far down to reach from the roof, but maybe there was another way.
“Hurry, if we can get to the windows on the 5th floor, we can pull him in,” I shouted.
Vincent nodded and we ran down the stairs, searching for the room closest to him in the water. The screaming helped. When we dragged him inside, he was covered in scratches and bites from teeth that looked very human, some very deep and freely bleeding. His skin was stained from the dark water. The hands continued to reach for him, so I slammed the window shut, leaving them to paw at the glass, just as Manny burst into the room, followed by the other two guests. Seeing the seriousness of his injuries, Manny moved closer, kneeling next to me.
“Some of these are very deep. We need to get pressure on the wounds. Go grab some towels,” he instructed Stewart’s companions.
He inspected the bites and scratches more closely,
“Lucy, this bite is on an artery, press down on it hard, or he will bleed out. Vincent, go get some soap and water, we will have to clean this as best we can, under the circumstances.”
Vincent rose and Manny and I were left alone with Stewart, who seemed to have passed out.
“You seem to know what you are doing,” I noted, pressing down on the bleeding wound.
“I… I was a doctor, once,” he didn’t meet my eyes when he said it.
“Wow.”
“It was a long time ago. Another life.”
“Why didn’t you ever…” I was interrupted when Stewart’s eyes snapped open.
“I need a priest,” Stewart grabbed Manny’s collar, his eyes fevered and unfocused. “I need to confess my sins, before I die.”
“You aren’t going to…”
“We killed him,” he pressed on, oblivious to my objections. “Alan Ross.”
“The billionaire?” I blurted, surprised. “But he died in a… shipwreck…”
I fell silent. I remembered the news stories; Ross had been on a luxury yacht on the way to the Cayman Islands when it wrecked in a storm. The entire crew was lost, except for the captain, the chief mate, and a single deckhand, who had survived in a lifeboat. Ross was in the lifeboat as well, but he had already drowned, before they were able to drag him on board. They had drifted for over two weeks, with his corpse, before they were found and rescued. It had been a major news story, about a decade ago.
“It wasn’t like the news reported,” Stewart gasped. “When the yacht started taking on water, we should have stayed and helped to organize the evacuation of the crew. But Ross wanted to leave right away. He offered us money if we took just him and abandoned the others. We agreed, the captain and I. Lesley was just a deckhand, but he saw us leaving and followed. We quietly launched a lifeboat and fled, leaving the others to their fates.”
“How did Ross die?” I asked.
“He had a bag with him. It was so heavy he could hardly carry it. When he put it in the boat, it fell open and it was filled with diamonds. He was taking them to the Caymans. When we saw that, we… well, we decided. If he didn’t survive the shipwreck, if the diamonds were never found, who would know? We drowned him and hid the diamonds. When we were rescued, we waited awhile, then we sold them, made millions. But it wasn’t worth it… it wasn’t worth this. The guilt…”
He slumped to the ground. Manny met my eyes over the body,
“I think we lost him.”
As I looked up from the body, I saw Jack and Lesley standing there in the doorway, towels in their hands. There was an ugly look on Jack’s face.
“I wish he hadn’t told you that.”
“Told us what? He was raving, delusional,” I attempted.
“We were standing right here,” he replied.
I swallowed hard. Jack advanced into the room, holding a broken table leg like a club.
“We’ve kept this secret all these years, it isn’t getting out now.”
“We won’t tell anyone,” I protested.
“That isn’t a chance I am willing to take. Besides, with the food supply exhausted, it was always going to come to this, eventually. Might as well get it over with.”
“What are you doing?” I heard Vincent call from the doorway.
“Lesley, take care of him, will you?” Jack continued to advance on us.
“Please Jack, hasn’t there been enough death?” Lesley protested.
“Don’t act all innocent, you agreed to this, just like the rest of us. In for a penny, in for a pound, my friend.”
I glanced around for a weapon. Between the three of us, we should be able to take him, but I didn’t much like the look in Jack’s eyes. Manny had stood, backing slowly away as Jack advanced. Then the captain took a swing at him, Manny jumped to the side and the makeshift bat shattered the window behind him. Jack’s expression turned to one of horror as a pair of pale hands gripped the doorframe and a body began heaving itself through the open window. The broken glass sliced its bloated flesh to ribbons, but it didn’t halt the creature’s ingress. Dark, thick liquid that smelled of death oozed from its wounds.
“Alan!” Jack exclaimed, backing away swinging his bat at the creature.
“You owe me,” it gurgled.
We all backed out into the hall, but the creature advanced, slowly, leaving a trail of black liquid on the carpet as it walked.
“Is it money you want? I can get you your money back, your diamonds,” Jack offered.
“What use do I have for money?” it wheezed. “You owe me a life.”
Jack hit the body with his club, but it didn’t slow its progress. He screamed as it reached out a hand and closed it around his throat. Jack was lifted off his feet and the creature carried him to the stairs and plunged him into the dark water. At first, he flailed and fought, but a dozen hands rose from the water, gripping every part of his body. When he was completely immobilized, the corpse released him, letting him be dragged down into the depths. Then, it turned,
“Now,” it spoke to Lesley. “Will you fight, or come willingly?”
Lesley was trembling so hard he could barely stand,
“Please, I’m sorry, I beg you, spare me.”
The creature’s lips curled into a grotesque smile,
“Do you regret what you did to me?”
“I do, I do. I never should have agreed with their plan. Please, have mercy.”
“Did you have mercy on me, when I begged?”
Lesley shook his head.
“Then accept your fate.”
“What… what do you want me to do?”
“Walk into the water. Give your life willingly. Perhaps they will spare you, if you do,” the creature laughed, dark liquid bubbling from its mouth.
Lesley nodded haltingly and began to walk towards the stairs, stepping into the water, he walked down until he was submerged up to his waist. Then, the hands wrapped around his arms and torso and abruptly dragged him under. For a long moment, it seemed like he was gone, the same as Jack, but a moment later, he was thrown back onto the landing. Lesley raised his eyes, now as black as the water, and the creature smiled again, a tooth falling from its mouth as it did.
“Very good,” it burbled. “You have been baptized and born again into a new life.”
Lesley nodded, a serene smile on his face. Without a word, he rose and walked back into the room we had vacated only a moment before. Outside the window, the raft had been righted and floated serenely on the water. He looked down at Stewart’s body, then picked it up and draped it over his shoulder. Glancing back at the three of us, he winked,
“A snack for the journey.”
Then, he stepped out of the window onto the raft and drifted away.
“Don’t suppose any of you would care to join him?” the corpse of Alan Ross inquired. “Be born anew in the cleansing water?”
We all shook our heads silently.
“Oh well, another time, then.”
And with that, the corpse walked into the water and disappeared.
That night, our usual meals appeared in our rooms, and by the next morning, the water had receded, as if it had never been there. The electricity came back on, and the rain stopped. I was finally able to charge my phone and post this account. I tried asking Manny for more information about his time as a doctor but is as reticent as ever. I will keep trying, though, because Vincent and Al are right about one thing, there is something suspicious about how much he knows that he shouldn’t. But, that is a problem for another day, after all there is no need to rush, we aren’t going anywhere.
Until next time,
Lucy

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*
Chapter Eleven - The Room of Doors
‘Get moving!’
Sara watched the men readying their horses, squinting at the brightness of the stone. The courtyard was full of the sound of boot-steps and creaking leather. Overhead, a thin veil of rippled grey hung over the early winter sky, and the dawn sun tugged gleaming at its edges. Overhead, the dull black shape of an old stormtower bled the sky. Empty, just like the rest of them. There was something very jarring, Sara decided, about the worn jerkins and stubbled cheeks of her father’s men, ensconced in a pillared courtyard of vast stone. They were out of place, and they had been every moment since arriving in Uldoroth, she realised. They didn’t belong here. Her own anxiety was mirrored imperfectly with the relief on their weary faces, and the dark rings under their eyes seemed just a little less deep. There may be Black Hand to deal with, back in the Westmere, but it was home. At least there your enemies had the decency to show themselves. Sara realised she was chewing her lip. At her back, two of the Black Guard waited wordlessly in their gold-touched armour, much more in keeping with the finery of the courtyard, and everything else in the capital. They were waiting to escort her away to the Queen, unaware they found a girl not so eager for the honour as she had been, just a few days before.
‘Father!’ She called out, spying him across the writhing mass of men in their moss green cloaks, but he seemed not to hear her. He was standing near the arched cloister at the far side of the square, cloaked and ready for travel, in hurried conversation with a shaded figure standing beyond the marble facade. She squinted, trying to make out the other man, but there was nothing but a dark shadow to trace.
‘Well then, M’lady.’ A voice said beside her, and she turned to find Halin looking down at her, a kind smile on his broad face. ‘You’ll be a right proper Princess when I next see you, methinks.’
Sara smiled at him and shook her head sheepishly. ‘Uldoroth is not my home, yet, Halin. I won’t forget.’
‘Be careful you don’t, Lady Sara.’ Halin glanced distrustfully at the Black Guard behind her. ‘Lots of fancy folk here. Fancy folk with fancier lies.’
‘I’ll be careful, Halin.’ She told him seriously.
He smiled again, and the sternness dissolved away from his face.
‘Take care, M’Lady.’ He told her, dipping his head politely. She returned the gesture, dropping into a small curtsy.
‘Look after my father, will you?’
‘Always, M’Lady.’
Halin hurried off into the throng in the square, and Sara watched him go, feeling her the knot in her belly tighten. The conversations with her unexpected visitors had left their mark, a nagging uncertainty gnawing at the excitement that had carried her through her first few uneventful days in the capital. The little comfort she had taken in the presence of her father and his men was a loss she could ill afford. She watched her father’s back, frowning softly to herself. Her thoughts were not what she had imagined, when she had thought of him leaving. A hundred different times, and more. Had she expected tears, grief at the parting? Relief? Instead, there was only the fear, a dull, leaden weight in her belly, clammy-cold as marsh-water.
‘Come on, you whoresons! I want to be on the road before lunch!’ Halin roared, and the men quickened their work. Her father had not moved, still deep in conversation, just out of sight. She peered a little closer, and for a moment the pale sunlight crept over the top of the square, flashing against a colourful doublet marked with a silver brooch. The Fox’s lips barely moved as he spoke from the shadows of the cloister, and her father was scowling. Sara frowned.
‘Mount up!’
The ornate wagon that had been her home all those weeks trundled into the square, then, drawn by a pair of stout horses. Sara saw her father turn reluctantly towards it, striding out into the square. Sara peered past him into the cloister, and for a moment Lord Bywood’s sharp eyes caught hers. Then he smiled, dipping his dark, smooth head, and vanished himself away into the shadows.
‘Father!’
Sara hurried out into the crowded square, leaving her escort behind, darting between the shifting limbs of the horses. Her father turned towards her as she approached, and smiled small smile, in two parts, one weary, one sad.
‘Sara.’
She threw her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest for a moment, and he put an arm around her shoulders. She knew her role, and the knowing of it made her safe for a moment. Then she stepped back, looking up at him.
‘I thought you were going to leave without saying goodbye.’
‘I… There was much preparation to do.’
Sara did not reply. His eyes had that same distance that they had had since they arrived in the capital. Uldoroth had worn at him, as if all the brightness and finery had made his skin dull, eyes darkened like the contrast of shadows in bright sun.
‘Will you write?’
He blinked as she spoke, then smiled, and the tiredness fell away from him for a moment. He took her chin gently in one hand, tilting it up to meet his eyes.
‘Yes, I will write.’ He told her, and she saw again that fierce ambition in his eyes, the look she had known so well on their journey from the Westmere. Swollen around the soft, lazy ease of diminished strength. ‘And I shall expect news in return. The Rose of Westmere will show these fools how a real lady charms.’
Sara smiled and lowered her eyes self-consciously.
‘I… I will not disappoint you, father.’ She said quietly, and found, in spite of herself, that there were tears in her eyes.
‘See that you do not.’ He replied. Then he let go of her chin and climbed quickly into the carriage. He leaned out from the window for a moment, before they were gone, banging a hand against the wooden panels of the door impatiently.
‘Move out!’
‘You heard him!’ Halin bellowed in response, holding his horse in check beneath him. ‘Back to Westmere, before your wives go straying!’
With that, her father’s men spurred their horses away into the white corridors of the citadel, bound for the sky-cages and the city below. They had arrived on foot, leading their steeds, but they left by horseback, hurried by grave purpose towards the long road west. She watched the window of the carriage as it trundled away with the horses, but her father did not appear again. She stayed there, staring after them, until the party were out of sight and the great gate of the keep heaved closed behind them, slamming into the distant stone with a resounding thud.
‘M’Lady.’
She turned to find the Black Guard waiting, watching her with dark eyes through the narrow slits of their polished helms. For a moment, the suddenness of the departure threatened to overwhelm her. What was it he had told her, slurring over his unfinished dinner, in the pristine perfection of their lodgings, surrounded by invisible eyes? Power belongs to the strong. To those who take it. Just then, standing in the courtyard, watching alone as her father departed, she realised that he was right. And he wasn’t strong enough. She took a deep breath, smiling for the Black Guard, and followed them out of the ancient courtyard into the halls beyond.
*
The broad, open avenues and garden-ways of the Keep of Eranor closed in to interior corridors rather quickly, when you knew the way, and soon Sara was following her black-gilded escort through pale passageways lined with statuettes and tapestries, ceilings lost far overhead to the flickering light of amber flames. An occasional glimpse of pale sunlight leaped out across the stone floor, shimmering through shifting motes of dust. Sara was her Lady-self again, graceful and poised, gliding over the polished floor after her escort. The giant corridors were a maze of twists and turns, past fragment-views of gardens and libraries and sitting-halls and galleries, but she was dimly aware they were moving towards the Hall of the King. The thought made her a little giddy.
‘Will I be received in the King’s Hall?’ She asked as they walked, but the Black Guards didn’t reply, and their armour clinked in the quiet. Sara frowned, following them. The passage curved, rising, and she found that the wall on her right side suddenly gave way to the hall below. One of the galleries, set high in the rafters of the King’s Hall. She stopped, putting her hand on the balustrade and peering out over the ledge, into the vaulted, silent emptiness of the hall. Some fifty foot below, the patterned black and white marble of the floor gleamed in flashes of reflected amber, quiet and empty. At the far end, pale sunlight caught the Night Throne, setting fire in the mirrored stone. Overhead, the matching nightglass ceiling gleamed like a lake in starlight, and swirling figures swept back and forth across it in the shifting light of the chamber. Sara felt a little thrill run over her neck.
‘Sara.’
Sara blinked, starting, and found Dana standing beside her.
‘Sister!’ Sara took hold of her sister’s hands and rose onto her tiptoes, pressing a kiss against her cheek. ‘Here to welcome me into the fold?’
She was struck again by the strangeness of her sister, the difference in her. Dana wore black, a dress of simple lines and inlaid jet, at once relaxed and taut as a lute string. Her pale hands were folded over her belly, and her muddy dark hair was pulled back into a bun. The Black Guards halted behind her, waiting.
‘I am to escort you to the Queen’s chambers.’ Dana said simply. With that she turned and began to walk away along the balcony, towards a closed door at the throne-end of the hall. Sara frowned, hurrying after her.
‘Do the King and Queen not share chambers?’ She asked as they walked, and the hall below drew on beside them.
‘Their Majesties prefer… to keep their own space.’
The Black Guard fell into step at a respectful distance behind them, armoured heels clicking against the stone.
‘How many others are there?’
‘How many what?’
‘Handmaidens. How many does her Majesty keep?’
Dana did not break stride. ‘Two others, and the Matron.’
‘I suppose we shall not have servants of our own.’ Sara said quietly, eyeing the shadows shifting over the nightglass ceiling. ‘No need to spy on us when we are so close.’
‘Sara-’ Dana began, but Sara cut her off.
‘Father is gone, you know. This morning.’
‘I know.’ Dana replied, looking ahead.
‘You did not come to see him.’
Dana did not turn.
‘I’m sure he will miss you terribly, sister.’
Sara bristled suddenly, grabbing her sister’s arm.
‘I did not ask for it!’
Dana looked down at the hand on her arm, frowning. ‘What?’
‘Any of it!’ Sara told her, angry now, her whisper cracking. ‘I didn’t ask to stay. I didn’t ask him to send you away. I would have given anything to go with you. I thought he would never let me leave.’ She lowered her voice, flicking an eye back towards the waiting guards. ‘I did not ask for the way he… the way he…’
She took a breath, swallowing, and straightened, looking her sister in the eye.
‘There are worse things than being ignored, Dana.’
Dana’s hand folded over hers.
‘Let’s… let’s put it behind us.’ She said quietly. ‘You are here, now.’
Sara blinked at her, nodding. She wanted to say more, but her words would not come, locked away from her tongue by the choked gulping of her breath. She lowered her eyes, and Dana squeezed her hand.
‘Sara, listen to me.’ Dana murmured, leaning close. ‘You must be careful. The Queen-’
The door at the far end of the gallery swung open, creaking on its hinges. The pair fell silent, frozen, and whatever Dana might have said, she held instead.
*
‘Wait here.’
The Matron, the head of the Queen’s Keepers, was an elderly woman with rounding hips and hair the colour of ash tied into a tight bun behind the worn-leather creases of her forehead. She was wearing black, same as Dana, though her smock was somehow plainer, when she opened the door onto the gallery, ushering the sisters wordlessly into the corridor beyond. Dana had bowed her head deferentially, withering under the Matron’s hard eyes, and quickly disappeared into one of the many doors of the hallway. Sara almost asked for her to stay, but instead she steeled herself, remembering her lessons, and followed the stern old woman down the long, flickering hallway. The corridors of the keep were all severe, all lit by weak, flickering torchlight and gleaming the gleam of cold stone, but here they were particularly bare. There were no busts, no tapestries, no mosaics. Nothing but cold, dead rock, lent a little life by the dim thrustings of infrequent braziers. In her own apartments, she had understood the quiet, but here, in the keep proper, there was an eery silence to the corridors that jarred with Sara’s anticipation. Where were the nobles in their gay clothes, where was the music and laughter of a King’s Hall? Sara frowned to herself, and kept walking.
The room at the end of the hallway was broad and rounded, like a kind of circle made out of many flat edges, each holding the low light of a brazier. The marble floors were black and white and patterned like a gamesboard, empty but for a broad nightwood table at its centre, matching the room itself for its odd roundness. On the far side, a wall of shutters opened out onto a large, bare balcony, and over the intricately wrought stone balustrade, Sara could see the City of the Moon below, sweeping away towards the edge of the Heartspire, empty stormtowers stabbing black into the sky. Beyond, the great emerald plains of Valia stretched out into the west, past the fiery line of the river Arq, scored with jagged, dark rock and silver streams. Sara swallowed, realising she’d never been so high up.
‘Wait here.’
‘But-‘ She protested, frowning, but the Matron was already gone, turned on her heel and disappeared back the way she had come. Sara flinched as the door slammed shut behind her, and the silence of the room prickled at her skin. The breeze rustled over the balcony, swirling about the pillared windows, but the air inside was still as the grave. She stepped slowly over to the table, touching the polished wood. This much nightwood would have cost more than a wagonload of gold. She traced the knotted lines across the black surface, trying to ignore the cold weight churning in her gut.
Time stretched on around her, and the minutes dragged by like years. Despite the open air flooding through the windows, the chamber was not cool, warmed by the subtle glow of the braziers, and she felt a little wetness beginning to build under her arms. She looked about herself, trying to calm her heart. There were four other doors in the room, besides the one they had entered through, all dark and heavy looking, and each bore a pattern of silver on its face. There was a cradle, and opposite it, a pendant with teeth like a wolf. Beside the cradle door, a small drinks table, a glass jug of purple wine atop it, with a pair of matching glasses. The two doors closest to the balcony bore a sun and a crescent moon. She looked a little closer, and realised that the markings were not moonsilver, merely an imitation in gleaming silver paint, and the door she had entered through bore no markings at all. Sara watched them, imagining the rooms that lay behind each. Which one was the Queen behind, she wondered, and her heart quickened at the thought, stomach churning. She was stranded, here, now, in the capital. What if the Queen didn’t like her? What if she said something wrong? Would she be sent away again, back to her father?
‘Lady Westmere.’
The crescent moon had swung open, and the Queen glided through, a beautiful shadow in a studded black dress, arms glistening with little sharpened sequins the colour of midnight. Her hair had been contorted into an elaborate maze of raven curls over her pate, and her pale skin took on a translucent sheen in the pale light from the balcony doors. The throat of her dress was open, as it had been in the King’s Hall all those days ago, and she wore the same golden necklace, its myriad points sharp like daggers with their drops of ruby blood.
Sara blinked, then remembered herself, and dropped into a low curtsy, bowing her head.
‘Your Majesty.’ She said quietly, keeping her eyes on the floor.
The Queen did not reply. Sara was dimly aware of her shadow moving across the floor, crossing to the drinks table beside the cradle door. Sara risked a glance up, then, and found the Queen’s slender back to her. When she at last turned, she had a glass goblet of wine clutched in her narrow fingers. Sara lowered her eyes again.
‘You are a pretty one, aren’t you.’ The Queen said quietly, as if to herself. Her voice was cold, like ice leaking over lakewater, deep and still. She took a sip from her cup, and Sara could feel the cut of her eyes against her skin. ‘What did the Weasel of Westmere do to sire such a pretty daughter. Your sister, maybe, I understand, but you…’
Sara forced herself not to frown.
‘Well trained, I see.’ The Queen murmured, smiling coldly. She took another sip of her wine. ‘Your mother’s touch, I assume, not your father’s.’
Sara hesitated. She glanced up at the Queen, then lowered her eyes again, nodding.
‘I hear she is unwell.’
Sara looked up again, braver this time, and found the Queen’s dark eyes watching her over the rim of her glass.
‘She has an affliction, Your Majesty. She does not eat, and rarely sleeps. The Keepers say it is a disease of her mind.’
‘The one thing none of us can escape.’ The Queen sighed, toying idly with her glass and looking out of the window over the city below. ‘Still, there are worse places to be sickly than a Lord’s hall.’
‘I suppose… I suppose that is true, Your Majesty.’
The Queen raised an eyebrow. ‘Suppose, do you?’
Sara squirmed for a moment under the weight of her eyes, but then the Queen turned away, stepping slowly around the edge of the table till she was standing beside the open windows. She took another sip of her wine, back to Sara again.
‘Your sister met you, this morning.’
Sara hesitated, thrown for a moment by the abruptness of the statement.
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘And she came to you yesterday, in the apartments Bywood found for you.’
‘Yes.’ Sara felt the cold weight return in her belly. She thought of what the Fox had warned her. There is always someone watching. She cast her mind back to her conversations with Dana. Gods. What had they spoken of? Had she said something out of turn?
‘Curious, that she did not seek out your father.’
Sara let out her breath slowly. That was not a particularly well-hidden curiosity.
‘Dana must have been very busy, Your Majesty.’
‘She is as busy as I make her, and that is rarely too taxing.’
Sara sighed. ‘They have… sometimes not seen eye to eye.’
‘And you?’ The Queen turned as she spoke, fixing her eyes to Sara’s again. Behind her, the distant sounds of the city drifted lazily up through the air, swirling around far-off columns of wispy smoke. ‘What do you say of him?’
Sara hesitated again, stuttering. ‘He is my father, Your Majesty. I trust that he always knows what is best for his daughters.’
‘In my experience it is fathers who know the least about their own daughters.’ The Queen replied dryly, sipping again. ‘Come, let me look at you, then.’
She came back around the nightwood table, her long, narrow limbs gliding over the polished floor, and stopped in front of Sara, setting her glass down beside them. She took Sara’s chin in two spindly fingers and tilted it upwards so that she was looking her in the eye, only a few inches from her face. Sara realised again how tall she was, as tall as her father, at least, though her slender frame made her seem much smaller. She tried not to squirm, but she found that the Queen’s fingers dug uncomfortably into her chin, dark eyes flitting back and forth across her face like a hungry wolf.
‘Yes, very pretty.’ She said at last, not releasing her chin. Sara could feel her breath on her face, smelling softly of dark wine. ‘No wonder. You look like her, you know.’
‘Who-‘ but the Queen had already turned away, back to the table, picking up her wineglass in one bone-stretched hand.
‘The Matron will meet you outside. She will give you your tasks and show you to your chamber. You will begin tomorrow.’
Sara flinched, realising she had been holding her breath. She curtsied to the Queen’s back, suddenly a little giddy.
‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’
‘You may go, girl.’
Sara turned to go, not at all sure what to make of the encounter. She paused at the door, looking back over her shoulder, but found the Queen looking out over the city silently again, wineglass in hand, black dress glistening with jet. Sara hesitated a moment longer, then hurried out into the corridor beyond the unmarked door, closing it behind her.
*
The night before her father leaves, she wakes in darkness.
She does not open her eyes, but she knows it is not yet dawn. The sounds of the garden beyond her shutters are soft and murmuring, wind-stirred and drip-spotted.
She can feel him over her, the tense stillness of him, closer than shadows. He smells of wine. Sweat. She is cold, but she does not move. She dares not move. She can feel the weight of his eyes, dulled with drink, tracing the lines of her. His breathing sounds like anger.
She does not know how long she waits there, frozen. But she does not open her eyes. Not once. Time stretches out before her in that moment, an eternity of breathless terror.
Then he leaves. The smell of him lingers long after the door has closed behind him. She lays there a while longer, motionless, dead as stone. Then she curls into her own arms, and weeps silently until the dawn.

Series Page - Read 10 weeks ahead on Patreon - Read the story so far on Royal Road
*
Chapter Eleven - The Room of Doors
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‘Get moving!’
Sara watched the men readying their horses, squinting at the bright-ness of the stone. The courtyard was full of the sound of boot-steps and creaking leather. Overhead, a thin veil of rippled grey hung over the early winter sky, and the dawn sun tugged gleaming at its edges. Over-head, the dull black shape of an old stormtower bled the sky. Empty, just like the rest of them. There was something very jarring, Sara de-cided, about the worn jerkins and stubbled cheeks of her father’s men, ensconced in a pillared courtyard of vast stone. They were out of place, and they had been every moment since arriving in Uldoroth, she real-ised. They didn’t belong here. Her own anxiety was mirrored imper-fectly with the relief on their weary faces, and the dark rings under their eyes seemed just a little less deep. There may be Black Hand to deal with, back in the Westmere, but it was home. At least there your ene-mies had the decency to show themselves. Sara realised she was chew-ing her lip. At her back, two of the Black Guard waited wordlessly in their gold-touched armour, much more in keeping with the finery of the courtyard, and everything else in the capital. They were waiting to es-cort her away to the Queen, unaware they found a girl not so eager for the honour as she had been, just a few days before.
‘Father!’ She called out, spying him across the writhing mass of men in their moss green cloaks, but he seemed not to hear her. He was standing near the arched cloister at the far side of the square, cloaked and ready for travel, in hurried conversation with a shaded figure stand-ing beyond the marble facade. She squinted, trying to make out the oth-er man, but there was nothing but a dark shadow to trace.
‘Well then, M’lady.’ A voice said beside her, and she turned to find Halin looking down at her, a kind smile on his broad face. ‘You’ll be a right proper Princess when I next see you, methinks.’
Sara smiled at him and shook her head sheepishly. ‘Uldoroth is not my home, yet, Halin. I won’t forget.’
‘Be careful you don’t, Lady Sara.’ Halin glanced distrustfully at the Black Guard behind her. ‘Lots of fancy folk here. Fancy folk with fan-cier lies.’
‘I’ll be careful, Halin.’ She told him seriously.
He smiled again, and the sternness dissolved away from his face.
‘Take care, M’Lady.’ He told her, dipping his head politely. She re-turned the gesture, dropping into a small curtsy.
‘Look after my father, will you?’
‘Always, M’Lady.’
Halin hurried off into the throng in the square, and Sara watched him go, feeling her the knot in her belly tighten. The conversations with her unexpected visitors had left their mark, a nagging uncertainty gnawing at the excitement that had carried her through her first few uneventful days in the capital. The little comfort she had taken in the presence of her father and his men was a loss she could ill afford. She watched her father’s back, frowning softly to herself. Her thoughts were not what she had imagined, when she had thought of him leaving. A hundred dif-ferent times, and more. Had she expected tears, grief at the parting? Re-lief? Instead, there was only the fear, a dull, leaden weight in her belly, clammy-cold as marsh-water.
‘Come on, you whoresons! I want to be on the road before lunch!’ Halin roared, and the men quickened their work. Her father had not moved, still deep in conversation, just out of sight. She peered a little closer, and for a moment the pale sunlight crept over the top of the square, flashing against a colourful doublet marked with a silver brooch. The Fox’s lips barely moved as he spoke from the shadows of the cloister, and her father was scowling. Sara frowned.
‘Mount up!’
The ornate wagon that had been her home all those weeks trundled into the square, then, drawn by a pair of stout horses. Sara saw her fa-ther turn reluctantly towards it, striding out into the square. Sara peered past him into the cloister, and for a moment Lord Bywood’s sharp eyes caught hers. Then he smiled, dipping his dark, smooth head, and van-ished himself away into the shadows.
‘Father!’
Sara hurried out into the crowded square, leaving her escort behind, darting between the shifting limbs of the horses. Her father turned to-wards her as she approached, and smiled small smile, in two parts, one weary, one sad.
‘Sara.’
She threw her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest for a moment, and he put an arm around her shoulders. She knew her role, and the knowing of it made her safe for a moment. Then she stepped back, looking up at him.
‘I thought you were going to leave without saying goodbye.’
‘I… There was much preparation to do.’
Sara did not reply. His eyes had that same distance that they had had since they arrived in the capital. Uldoroth had worn at him, as if all the brightness and finery had made his skin dull, eyes darkened like the contrast of shadows in bright sun.
‘Will you write?’
He blinked as she spoke, then smiled, and the tiredness fell away from him for a moment. He took her chin gently in one hand, tilting it up to meet his eyes.
‘Yes, I will write.’ He told her, and she saw again that fierce ambi-tion in his eyes, the look she had known so well on their journey from the Westmere. Swollen around the soft, lazy ease of diminished strength. ‘And I shall expect news in return. The Rose of Westmere will show these fools how a real lady charms.’
Sara smiled and lowered her eyes self-consciously.
‘I… I will not disappoint you, father.’ She said quietly, and found, in spite of herself, that there were tears in her eyes.
‘See that you do not.’ He replied. Then he let go of her chin and climbed quickly into the carriage. He leaned out from the window for a moment, before they were gone, banging a hand against the wooden panels of the door impatiently.
‘Move out!’
‘You heard him!’ Halin bellowed in response, holding his horse in check beneath him. ‘Back to Westmere, before your wives go stray-ing!’
With that, her father’s men spurred their horses away into the white corridors of the citadel, bound for the sky-cages and the city below. They had arrived on foot, leading their steeds, but they left by horse-back, hurried by grave purpose towards the long road west. She watched the window of the carriage as it trundled away with the horses, but her father did not appear again. She stayed there, staring after them, until the party were out of sight and the great gate of the keep heaved closed behind them, slamming into the distant stone with a resounding thud.
‘M’Lady.’
She turned to find the Black Guard waiting, watching her with dark eyes through the narrow slits of their polished helms. For a moment, the suddenness of the departure threatened to overwhelm her. What was it he had told her, slurring over his unfinished dinner, in the pristine per-fection of their lodgings, surrounded by invisible eyes? Power belongs to the strong. To those who take it. Just then, standing in the courtyard, watching alone as her father departed, she realised that he was right. And he wasn’t strong enough. She took a deep breath, smiling for the Black Guard, and followed them out of the ancient courtyard into the halls beyond.
*
The broad, open avenues and garden-ways of the Keep of Eranor closed in to interior corridors rather quickly, when you knew the way, and soon Sara was following her black-gilded escort through pale pas-sageways lined with statuettes and tapestries, ceilings lost far overhead to the flickering light of amber flames. An occasional glimpse of pale sunlight leaped out across the stone floor, shimmering through shifting motes of dust. Sara was her Lady-self again, graceful and poised, glid-ing over the polished floor after her escort. The giant corridors were a maze of twists and turns, past fragment-views of gardens and libraries and sitting-halls and galleries, but she was dimly aware they were mov-ing towards the Hall of the King. The thought made her a little giddy.
‘Will I be received in the King’s Hall?’ She asked as they walked, but the Black Guards didn’t reply, and their armour clinked in the quiet. Sara frowned, following them. The passage curved, rising, and she found that the wall on her right side suddenly gave way to the hall be-low. One of the galleries, set high in the rafters of the King’s Hall. She stopped, putting her hand on the balustrade and peering out over the ledge, into the vaulted, silent emptiness of the hall. Some fifty foot be-low, the patterned black and white marble of the floor gleamed in flashes of reflected amber, quiet and empty. At the far end, pale sun-light caught the Night Throne, setting fire in the mirrored stone. Over-head, the matching nightglass ceiling gleamed like a lake in starlight, and swirling figures swept back and forth across it in the shifting light of the chamber. Sara felt a little thrill run over her neck.
‘Sara.’
Sara blinked, starting, and found Dana standing beside her.
‘Sister!’ Sara took hold of her sister’s hands and rose onto her tip-toes, pressing a kiss against her cheek. ‘Here to welcome me into the fold?’
She was struck again by the strangeness of her sister, the difference in her. Dana wore black, a dress of simple lines and inlaid jet, at once relaxed and taut as a lute string. Her pale hands were folded over her belly, and her muddy dark hair was pulled back into a bun. The Black Guards halted behind her, waiting.
‘I am to escort you to the Queen’s chambers.’ Dana said simply. With that she turned and began to walk away along the balcony, to-wards a closed door at the throne-end of the hall. Sara frowned, hurry-ing after her.
‘Do the King and Queen not share chambers?’ She asked as they walked, and the hall below drew on beside them.
‘Their Majesties prefer… to keep their own space.’
The Black Guard fell into step at a respectful distance behind them, armoured heels clicking against the stone.
‘How many others are there?’
‘How many what?’
‘Handmaidens. How many does her Majesty keep?’
Dana did not break stride. ‘Two others, and the Matron.’
‘I suppose we shall not have servants of our own.’ Sara said quietly, eyeing the shadows shifting over the nightglass ceiling. ‘No need to spy on us when we are so close.’
‘Sara-’ Dana began, but Sara cut her off.
‘Father is gone, you know. This morning.’
‘I know.’ Dana replied, looking ahead.
‘You did not come to see him.’
Dana did not turn.
‘I’m sure he will miss you terribly, sister.’
Sara bristled suddenly, grabbing her sister’s arm.
‘I did not ask for it!’
Dana looked down at the hand on her arm, frowning. ‘What?’
‘Any of it!’ Sara told her, angry now, her whisper cracking. ‘I didn’t ask to stay. I didn’t ask him to send you away. I would have given any-thing to go with you. I thought he would never let me leave.’ She low-ered her voice, flicking an eye back towards the waiting guards. ‘I did not ask for the way he… the way he…’
She took a breath, swallowing, and straightened, looking her sister in the eye.
‘There are worse things than being ignored, Dana.’
Dana’s hand folded over hers.
‘Let’s… let’s put it behind us.’ She said quietly. ‘You are here, now.’
Sara blinked at her, nodding. She wanted to say more, but her words would not come, locked away from her tongue by the choked gulping of her breath. She lowered her eyes, and Dana squeezed her hand.
‘Sara, listen to me.’ Dana murmured, leaning close. ‘You must be careful. The Queen-’
The door at the far end of the gallery swung open, creaking on its hinges. The pair fell silent, frozen, and whatever Dana might have said, she held instead.
*
‘Wait here.’
The Matron, the head of the Queen’s Keepers, was an elderly wom-an with rounding hips and hair the colour of ash tied into a tight bun behind the worn-leather creases of her forehead. She was wearing black, same as Dana, though her smock was somehow plainer, when she opened the door onto the gallery, ushering the sisters wordlessly in-to the corridor beyond. Dana had bowed her head deferentially, wither-ing under the Matron’s hard eyes, and quickly disappeared into one of the many doors of the hallway. Sara almost asked for her to stay, but instead she steeled herself, remembering her lessons, and followed the stern old woman down the long, flickering hallway. The corridors of the keep were all severe, all lit by weak, flickering torchlight and gleaming the gleam of cold stone, but here they were particularly bare. There were no busts, no tapestries, no mosaics. Nothing but cold, dead rock, lent a little life by the dim thrustings of infrequent braziers. In her own apartments, she had understood the quiet, but here, in the keep proper, there was an eery silence to the corridors that jarred with Sara’s anticipation. Where were the nobles in their gay clothes, where was the music and laughter of a King’s Hall? Sara frowned to herself, and kept walking.
The room at the end of the hallway was broad and rounded, like a kind of circle made out of many flat edges, each holding the low light of a brazier. The marble floors were black and white and patterned like a gamesboard, empty but for a broad nightwood table at its centre, matching the room itself for its odd roundness. On the far side, a wall of shutters opened out onto a large, bare balcony, and over the intricate-ly wrought stone balustrade, Sara could see the City of the Moon be-low, sweeping away towards the edge of the Heartspire, empty stormtowers stabbing black into the sky. Beyond, the great emerald plains of Valia stretched out into the west, past the fiery line of the river Arq, scored with jagged, dark rock and silver streams. Sara swallowed, realising she’d never been so high up.
‘Wait here.’
‘But-‘ She protested, frowning, but the Matron was already gone, turned on her heel and disappeared back the way she had come. Sara flinched as the door slammed shut behind her, and the silence of the room prickled at her skin. The breeze rustled over the balcony, swirling about the pillared windows, but the air inside was still as the grave. She stepped slowly over to the table, touching the polished wood. This much nightwood would have cost more than a wagonload of gold. She traced the knotted lines across the black surface, trying to ignore the cold weight churning in her gut.
Time stretched on around her, and the minutes dragged by like years. Despite the open air flooding through the windows, the chamber was not cool, warmed by the subtle glow of the braziers, and she felt a little wetness beginning to build under her arms. She looked about her-self, trying to calm her heart. There were four other doors in the room, besides the one they had entered through, all dark and heavy looking, and each bore a pattern of silver on its face. There was a cradle, and opposite it, a pendant with teeth like a wolf. Beside the cradle door, a small drinks table, a glass jug of purple wine atop it, with a pair of matching glasses. The two doors closest to the balcony bore a sun and a crescent moon. She looked a little closer, and realised that the markings were not moonsilver, merely an imitation in gleaming silver paint, and the door she had entered through bore no markings at all. Sara watched them, imagining the rooms that lay behind each. Which one was the Queen behind, she wondered, and her heart quickened at the thought, stomach churning. She was stranded, here, now, in the capital. What if the Queen didn’t like her? What if she said something wrong? Would she be sent away again, back to her father?
‘Lady Westmere.’
The crescent moon had swung open, and the Queen glided through, a beautiful shadow in a studded black dress, arms glistening with little sharpened sequins the colour of midnight. Her hair had been contorted into an elaborate maze of raven curls over her pate, and her pale skin took on a translucent sheen in the pale light from the balcony doors. The throat of her dress was open, as it had been in the King’s Hall all those days ago, and she wore the same golden necklace, its myriad points sharp like daggers with their drops of ruby blood.
Sara blinked, then remembered herself, and dropped into a low curt-sy, bowing her head.
‘Your Majesty.’ She said quietly, keeping her eyes on the floor.
The Queen did not reply. Sara was dimly aware of her shadow mov-ing across the floor, crossing to the drinks table beside the cradle door. Sara risked a glance up, then, and found the Queen’s slender back to her. When she at last turned, she had a glass goblet of wine clutched in her narrow fingers. Sara lowered her eyes again.
‘You are a pretty one, aren’t you.’ The Queen said quietly, as if to herself. Her voice was cold, like ice leaking over lakewater, deep and still. She took a sip from her cup, and Sara could feel the cut of her eyes against her skin. ‘What did the Weasel of Westmere do to sire such a pretty daughter. Your sister, maybe, I understand, but you…’
Sara forced herself not to frown.
‘Well trained, I see.’ The Queen murmured, smiling coldly. She took another sip of her wine. ‘Your mother’s touch, I assume, not your fa-ther’s.’
Sara hesitated. She glanced up at the Queen, then lowered her eyes again, nodding.
‘I hear she is unwell.’
Sara looked up again, braver this time, and found the Queen’s dark eyes watching her over the rim of her glass.
‘She has an affliction, Your Majesty. She does not eat, and rarely sleeps. The Keepers say it is a disease of her mind.’
‘The one thing none of us can escape.’ The Queen sighed, toying idly with her glass and looking out of the window over the city below. ‘Still, there are worse places to be sickly than a Lord’s hall.’
‘I suppose… I suppose that is true, Your Majesty.’
The Queen raised an eyebrow. ‘Suppose, do you?’
Sara squirmed for a moment under the weight of her eyes, but then the Queen turned away, stepping slowly around the edge of the table till she was standing beside the open windows. She took another sip of her wine, back to Sara again.
‘Your sister met you, this morning.’
Sara hesitated, thrown for a moment by the abruptness of the state-ment.
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
‘And she came to you yesterday, in the apartments Bywood found for you.’
‘Yes.’ Sara felt the cold weight return in her belly. She thought of what the Fox had warned her. There is always someone watching. She cast her mind back to her conversations with Dana. Gods. What had they spoken of? Had she said something out of turn?
‘Curious, that she did not seek out your father.’
Sara let out her breath slowly. That was not a particularly well-hidden curiosity.
‘Dana must have been very busy, Your Majesty.’
‘She is as busy as I make her, and that is rarely too taxing.’
Sara sighed. ‘They have… sometimes not seen eye to eye.’
‘And you?’ The Queen turned as she spoke, fixing her eyes to Sara’s again. Behind her, the distant sounds of the city drifted lazily up through the air, swirling around far-off columns of wispy smoke. ‘What do you say of him?’
Sara hesitated again, stuttering. ‘He is my father, Your Majesty. I trust that he always knows what is best for his daughters.’
‘In my experience it is fathers who know the least about their own daughters.’ The Queen replied dryly, sipping again. ‘Come, let me look at you, then.’
She came back around the nightwood table, her long, narrow limbs gliding over the polished floor, and stopped in front of Sara, setting her glass down beside them. She took Sara’s chin in two spindly fingers and tilted it upwards so that she was looking her in the eye, only a few inches from her face. Sara realised again how tall she was, as tall as her father, at least, though her slender frame made her seem much smaller. She tried not to squirm, but she found that the Queen’s fingers dug un-comfortably into her chin, dark eyes flitting back and forth across her face like a hungry wolf.
‘Yes, very pretty.’ She said at last, not releasing her chin. Sara could feel her breath on her face, smelling softly of dark wine. ‘No wonder. You look like her, you know.’
‘Who-‘ but the Queen had already turned away, back to the table, picking up her wineglass in one bone-stretched hand.
‘The Matron will meet you outside. She will give you your tasks and show you to your chamber. You will begin tomorrow.’
Sara flinched, realising she had been holding her breath. She curt-sied to the Queen’s back, suddenly a little giddy.
‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’
‘You may go, girl.’
Sara turned to go, not at all sure what to make of the encounter. She paused at the door, looking back over her shoulder, but found the Queen looking out over the city silently again, wineglass in hand, black dress glistening with jet. Sara hesitated a moment longer, then hurried out into the corridor beyond the unmarked door, closing it behind her.
*
The night before her father leaves, she wakes in darkness.
She does not open her eyes, but she knows it is not yet dawn. The sounds of the garden beyond her shutters are soft and murmuring, wind-stirred and drip-spotted.
She can feel him over her, the tense stillness of him, closer than shadows. He smells of wine. Sweat. She is cold, but she does not move. She dares not move. She can feel the weight of his eyes, dulled with drink, tracing the lines of her. His breathing sounds like anger.
She does not know how long she waits there, frozen. But she does not open her eyes. Not once. Time stretches out before her in that mo-ment, an eternity of breathless terror.
Then he leaves. The smell of him lingers long after the door has closed behind him. She lays there a while longer, motionless, dead as stone. Then she curls into her own arms, and weeps silently until the dawn.

​
Hi everyone! This is a complete English translation of the Aniara sequel book by Harry Martinson called Doriderna that was put together after the author died. This translation was put together using various translation programs that can be found online, so I can't guarantee that it is a perfect translation, but it's better than nothing. I will also post the original in Swedish so you can improve the translation or look up words etc. if you want. Hope you enjoy!
I would also like to let everyone know that I am also working on my own Aniara fan fiction short story that I call "The Lost Voices of Aniara". This story tells about the events aboard the Aniara from the view point of another passenger and attempts to add more details to the story. It should be ready in the next week or two.
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HARRY MARTINSON
The Dorides (Doriderna)
Remaining poems and prose pieces in selection and with preface by Tord Hall Albert Bonniers Förlag
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PREFACE
For reasons I will not go into here, Harry Martinson did not publish any new work in the last years of his life. There is therefore a very large literary legacy, the publication of which began in the fall of 1978 with "Längs ekots stigar" (Along the paths of the echo), published by Georg Svensson. This collection contains only a few purely scientific poems - the emphasis is on nature poetry. The selection was made from unpublished material - which had nevertheless reached the proof stage - in three previous collections.
It remains to address other lines of thought in Harry Martinson's work: the ideas in Aniara, which in various forms occupied his imagination until the end. To follow the continuation of this great theme - at least in part - is what I am trying to do in this second selection from the surviving archive.
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The 103 songs in Aniara were part of a larger set of poems, and the author then worked for several years on a sequel, to be called 'The Dorids', the people of the tribe of Doris. Around 1959 there were about 80 songs - most of them in more or less completed drafts. The dominant figure in the Dorids would not be Isagel or the Mimarobe, but Nobia, the Samaritan from the tundra planet and deportation site of Mars. Nobia would be a norna (fate goddess), though not a cruel goddess of fate, but a norna who weaves goodness into the fabric of the world.
But the whole project remained a large-scale endeavor. The reasons were many: illness, world events, which seemed to be moving towards a fulfillment of the prophecies in Aniara, and which gave him an increasingly dark view of life: he told me that "Aniara has become a neurosis" ... I feel like Mima being blown apart'. But the decisive reason was surely his demand for absolute freedom in his creativity. He did not want to be confined, and the result was, as he himself said, 'I have stepped out of Aniara'.
The fact that Harry Martinson stepped out of Aniara, and thus also out of the Dorides, does not at all mean that he left the motifs or ideas found there, which cover the scientific field from atoms to stars. Rather, it means that he was able to write without direct connection to the characters of Aniara and the Dorides in particular.
I have therefore considered it justified to call this entire collection the Dorides, even though the prose pieces and several poems do not have a clearly visible connection with such a title.
In order to comment briefly on the selection, I would like to say a few words about Harry Martinson's attitude towards modern science (it is my intention to return to this subject in more detail).
There are two main lines. One is deterministic, and has its roots in classical physics, founded by Newton, which dominated until the end of the 19th century. It has a philosophical form in the law of causation, which means that if you know enough facts about a certain course of events in the present and in the past, you can precisely specify the course of events in the future. Examples of such events in the 'big world' - the macrocosm - are solar and lunar eclipses.
But in the world of atoms - the microcosm - this determinism does not apply. Heisenberg demonstrated this through his uncertainty relation, also known as the indeterminacy principle. In the atoms, individual events are indeterminate, we cannot discern any causality - there is randomness. But chance can be mastered by the methods of statistics, and we must content ourselves with a "statistical causality", which describes the course of events in the atom with the highest possible degree of probability.
It is this second, indeterministic line that has long been followed by most physicists. But there is one major exception, and that is Einstein. At the 1927 meeting of physicists in Brussels, for example, he asked Bohr, Heisenberg and others with mild irony whether they really believed that God plays dice - "ob der liebe Gott würfelt". Einstein was convinced that the universe follows an ordering principle, a geometric structure, which can be called a world soul. This is a pantheistic view that is reminiscent of Spinoza.
Similar ideas are already present in Aniara, but in this selection the picture has become more sharply defined. Harry Martinson does not believe that chance plays a decisive role in the course of the world, as is clear from several poems and prose pieces. He believes more in Einstein than in dozens of other Nobel Prize winners. Apart from these authorities, he follows his intuition.
His approach to religion has often been quoted: he chooses the Riddler over the God. This belief is reflected in 'The Riddle'. In 'Poems on Light and Darkness', published in 1971, Harry Martinson, with 'The Inner Light' and 'The Bird in the Phoenix Bell', presents the events inside the atom itself. These poems show that - although 'Aniara' and 'The Dorides' are more about stars than atoms - he never lost his interest in the microcosm. In this selection, it is the atoms that are more interesting than the stars.
The bard enters the atom. He describes the course of events in a world which is completely beyond our senses and which, despite the enormous aids of science, we will probably never be able to understand exactly. The story itself probably comes from Gamow's book "Mr. Tompkins Explores the Atom". Published in Swedish translation in 1946, it is, along with "Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland" (also 1946), the versatile Gamow's best popular science books. Harry Martinson rated them highly.
The two poems 'Submerged as in a dream but still awake' and 'Actually, the comprehensibility was slight' depict a journey of thought into the atom, and the same motif recurs in several other places.
The poem "A Cosmic Thickness Lying Boundlessly Spread" poetically depicts a world development related to the hypothesis of the "stationary universe" put forward by Hoyle and others, and to Klein-Alfvén's "symmetrical cosmology". For several reasons - mainly aesthetic - Harry Martinson did not like the theory of 'the big bang', which was celebrated by most scientists. His poem should have been written quite a long time ago, and perhaps he would have changed his mind if he had been given the opportunity to understand what the "cosmic background radiation" - with a temperature of about 3 degrees above absolute zero - means for the credibility of "The big bang". It took natural scientists some time to become convinced that this radiation can best be interpreted as a fading glow after an unimaginable cosmic explosion some 18 billion years ago.
This selection also contains several pieces of prose, which in general do not need any comment. But I would like to mention a few. For "The Figuration Patterns of the Goddancer's Juggling Program", in three sections, there is a drawing by Harry Martinson, reproduced on the cover of this collection. The spread comes from Hindu philosophy: we see 'Siwa's juggling dance before Brama'. The dominant curves are so-called lemniscates, which were already known to the ancient Greeks. The lemniscate looks like an eight and is the mathematical symbol for infinity. It is defined as the trajectory of a point under the condition that the product of its distances to two given points is constant. In the center of the drawing there are several small curves. They are ellipses, and an ellipse - also first studied by the Greeks - is defined as the trajectory of a point under the condition that the sum of its distances to two given points is constant. The result is a geometric pattern, similar to a flower, which at the same time provides a poetic image of the complex interplay of forces in the atom with outward and inward energy impulses The juggler finds it increasingly difficult to work with his ball-particles as he progresses through the periodic table of the elements. In the end, he "dances the spectral theme in the dance of the Phoenix" - a symbol of the indestructibility of both energy and poetry, and a recurring motif in Martinson's poetry.
"Delsaga om tidens ariadnetråd" (Part of the saga of the Ariadne thread of time) is almost a fantasy about four-dimensional space, where you have to be careful not to get on the wrong track. The selection of prose pieces ends with "Some fairies dancing in the summer night near a quiet lake". It is a cheerful tale where the author combines a love of the Swedish summer with a love of light.
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I made this selection at the direct request of Harry. He even said several times that I should have all his scientific poems and prose pieces. But I think I judged this offer correctly when I saw it as an expression of his great generosity towards his friends. I always replied that he himself should complete and select what was to be published. But in his last years he did not want to publish anything. I therefore promised to make a selection if he did not change his mind.
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He did not, and this collection is the result.
Finally, I would like to thank Ingrid Martinson and Georg Svensson for the understanding and assistance they have given me in bringing this selection to fruition.
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Tord Hall
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The Dorides (Doriderna)
The book you hold was written in Mima's hall.
Now, on a secret wavelength, it is sent home to you, my friend, who for some years inhabits a spherical beach called the Valley of Doris.
In other words, it was written so close to your own being that nothing could be closer to you than those described here. You are one of them.
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Over the graves, the indifferent wind spreads
the whisper of the immortal gods
that no loss is foreseen in the grand scheme of things.
But what do the gods - those wasteful billionaires of the heavens - know about the beautiful and wonderful Doris?
how she was worth saving forever
and that whoever loved her
can never be comforted by the gods' continued waste.
About her a bird sings now alone in the tree of the grave. Of her as she was, the glorious one, if no other, the Dorides' thrush sings.
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The window was full of stars,
The Leonids' swarm of stars came, then you know the time.
Autumn was gone, its yellowing burnt.
The lookout tower, closed on the wooded mountains.
I stood as a child of a time that saw the stars detach from the roofs towards a room where novas frightened a more distant valley, I found other myths than those I was used to picking hurled at me from the space of the Leonids.
I stood in the cathedral of fear of dreams.
The great copper woman who lay there with her back soldered to the lid of the sarcophagus drove horror into me, cast my foot with lead.
That the copper woman knew who I was, I immediately sensed as a deadly weight, and that I had been summoned here by herself, by the queen of copper, of that I was certain.
In empty benches sat forgotten years, from the emptiness of the auditorium the organ pipes shone like stalactites in the vault of a cave and there was nothing, no light, no hint that gathered my crumbling courage.
For everything was fulfilled as it was written in stone once when the water abandoned the green and it was said that man will go away and become the dead slave of the dead dust.
And as I stood there gripped, filled with horror
for this judgment and epitaph
which was predetermined and rehearsed
in the mute trumpet of the seraphim of the stones,
bells fell suddenly from the towers to the earth that rocked with an ore-broken thunder, and the copper woman rose, a scream of remembrance drawn from afar to her lips as she drew me in close to her copper body in terrified death.
He woke up. There was light. It was day.
And the Samaritan Nobia sat silent, but still heard the echo of the screams his dreams had squeezed out of his fear.
She searched for words simple enough for a stranger to grasp, but not so simple as to drive away his trust, hardly won yet.
In simple action she finally found them.
And she stood up and smiled with milk
From the moors of Gondrin to the mouth of this fugitive.
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It is no exaggeration to say that space gave us long winter evenings rolled into one - the one that lasts. Our leisure time finally became a grim question with ice in our eyes and a frozen flame.
It became necessary to tell stories from reality - as it can be taken. I chose to tell about King Basii, who, supported by Chefone, forcibly turned himself into a god and magician in a celestial drama.
The Goldonder King felt like God and determined to live up to the gods he built himself a city in the sky.
It was a global world city of goldonders assembled into a kind of hive heaven.
But Basil's space-city, though it contained twelve million men in his service, was not enough for him; he had another built, and the greatest city in the world was soon in space. That city was a marvel to behold: a mighty golden dome, surrounded by three bionomically serving drabants, one of which was called the Vegetable City, one the Fish Drabant, and the third the Sting.
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The names reveal their role and purpose.
So Basii sits in his heavenly land. The aquarium dragon orbits faithfully and Stings follows it with fattened animals and the vegetable moon amounts to the redwood.
The golden dome was the city of retreat for all climbers and celestial rebels, for gamma was a poison to all alike and all poor and rich alike had to choose between death and escape.
So many preferred the city of Basil.
But although he rules over twelve million
inhabitants of the great city of space, he is still very rarely happy.
And although the dragons in a faithful circle
raise animals and grow fish and wheat
Basil's only pleasure is when he gets
with Vulvis, the royal slave, to bathe in Lethe.
But all the deliciously good virginity
that can be enjoyed in Basil's harem
is in its nakedness a skin of fear.
of frightened dissimulation. And his love story
...is but a tale to be seen from the outside..,
and all his lust a forced voluptuousness.
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Thus in The Night of Aniara I draw a little picture that everyone can understand from the rich treasure of reality.
And every time I make an arabesque in the hall of Mima about this space grotesque that Basil's space city can probably be said to be, I can for an hour or so make people sigh: the best is here anyway.
From Basil's false heaven we preserve. No, I'd rather travel with Aniara.
But soon the alarm goes off. The bells proclaim that the images of the fairy tale are overtaken by visions here that distress ignites.
And quickly to the halls I return.
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The Goldonder's garden bubbled with glamour. A party was being held there and Chefone was there. He showed us a picture of the smith of happiness: the goldonder king Basii, a portrait jubilantly taken on the day the fifteen thousandth goldonder lay in the field ready for the wave of endlessness.
Then we were each seized by thoughtfulness and went to our own in solitude.
For in every ship of this number there was a Mima locked up in its cage.
The Rapid criminal was much loved and could operate as he pleased under the protection of the admiration he aroused. He always appeared at great speeds and abducted women whom he brought to Chefone in light blue rapid rockets.
Of course it was criminal, the people of the valley thought, but the charm was so close to the deed that the rampart was breached by sheer admiration and open worship soon followed the advice of restraint at the murder pedal.
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Tucked away in a corner of our gondola, I pretend to smile at some rough fellows who spend their evenings with mockery and violence, with a devilish flutter as their sole aim.
They look at me and find me mortified,
- The clear approval is what they expect...
and I'm close to being squeezed badly
every time they jokingly glance at my grave door.
The brute is approaching, his dull face with many a foolish whim weighing on his mind.
And many a scowl missed by pigs from the worst corners of the soul he throws at me.
And when, full of fear, I strike with depleted strength in the dull face, the troll is only amused by my blow and raises his eyebrow with interest.
Then I flee between the troll's legs and out the other side of the danger of death.
How this happened can only be fully explained by the light of the gopher and the fourth tensor theory.
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Here came the sober, composed and sober man who always kept his soul in trim and stuck to the dry, honest maxims of life.
Now he went into the fire with his imagination.
His cool reason was completely burned His sober composure was fried in seconds when the photo turbo in Xinombra exaggerated the cold matter.
And yet I can't help but admire the man as he made his way to the office where he had been employed for many years
and where, despite offers to flee to the tundra, he provided punch cards for thousands who broke up every day.
There died a man who never raised his voice, who always remained true to his calm tone, the martyr of calm composure who was burned when the cruel fires of excess were lit.
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One is often chilled to the rock crystal by everything one hears before the ear falls like gray-white ash into the cremation hall.
And the girl from Rind who sees nothing is often heard to ask beyond the eye: how is the world of such torment visible? What is to be seen in this madness, where eeriness against eeriness is heard to answer?
Cultivating insight seemed futile
and many fell away from the faithful crowd.
and its program which was to see through
so that with the transparency of evil
as lens and instrument
try to find new signs
and new ways for the land of Gond.
Most people grew tired and withdrew from the room of the Truth Service, and Nobia sat for long periods almost alone, trying to hold on to her looms, always tormented
by the blood moisture of evil memories, the echoes of horror
surrounded her days
and made the Mara a bedfellow
who tore the fabric of the noman
and raped Nobia's dream
and the mood of life over the moors of Gondria.
It is as important to us to have friends
in the houses of distant worlds as at home by
the familiar road of the green earth.
You are reflected in endless eyes, watched by immense spectators.
They never interfere, but they watch the sewing and the mining,
the nurse and doctor on the rounds and the weapons in the shamelessly cruel wars.
Your own position under their eyes may be likened to the position you take with one whom you do not wish to grieve, but to share joy and to please.
So spoke the old astronomer, and then laid his head down to rest.
And he went smiling to the eternity that had been waiting by his side all his life.
His forehead shone with its ideas, even in the dead of death in the years of space.
He was among those who know the fairies of everything, those who get to comb Berenice's hair.
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But for the longest time I still want to believe that this is the torment of an evil dream and the ship Aniara a phantom from which I will wake up in the Valley of Doris.
Perhaps everything is a nightmare and I want to wait with poison and a knife. They say there are dreams of a kind that seem as long as a man's life.
Out of the dust you were born, from its gifts you were supported.
You did not manage the gift, many a meadow you made desolate.
What is beyond this sea is called Going down deep among riddles too great to be found in a grave.
Faith can never cover more than what you see in spirit.
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All the other things are too much to bear.
Do you hear the sound of the rescue team calling from an emergency station that is one of a thousand others, regardless of faith?
Now guess where the road leads and what Paradise is.
One of a thousand rescue stations scattered along the coast here.
Now I want to sing to my ear and ask it to listen to a voice that descends not to destroy the language I have collected for comfort. For the comfort of life and death, I whisper the price of sensitivity every time the sinful flow of language storms the breeze of the spirit.
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One night Heba lay awake in the city of Aniara and heard the painter's joyful painting.
The skilled varnisher was varnishing the years that would one day end on a stainless steel stretcher.
And suddenly from Heba there was a shout against the smooth roof.
The skilled varnishers know their business well.
Too hard to become joy, too happy to become sorrow. The painters paint everything in Aniara's castle.
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We know that we have been left out of the higher insight of the ocean of mystery and that we lack the tools to reach the depths of clarity that Mima once gave. But since Mima's death, the average of what we achieve of truth is not very high average is what is required if the choice of new paths is to be avoided.
A small number reach the values that should be the average to reach.
The others are satisfied with the flow of thought,
the rattle with which time is made to pass.
A daughter of my mother, called Tovi, was born in the night of space. Alas, dear ones, where can the crowd's demand for sensation and wonder lead us?
First came, as it should be, the blissfully sweet and indescribably pure birth, when the mimicry lay naked, uncovered and panting in the golden bed of the formula.
To her camp now came the mimicry and winged it
the naked one, as when the butterfly flies the honey chalice of its flower, in Dori's meadows. The description is not given (much to my regret) because there is always the possibility of a wave of miracles taking place in secret, to the great disappointment of many who wish to see how the mimagyne makes love, and from what angle the picture of the goddess's love life should be taken in order to really reach the audience.
Can it not be enough that Tovi gave birth to an allegorical child whom Isagel happily suckled at her breast and practiced miracles and consolation You may think so yourself, but others think otherwise.
For not even a mimagyn can defend the fruit of her womb against the human hyena who demands a clear answer on every point of what precedes it all: the prelude to sowing,
with the insides of the thighs well described in a clear image that gives the "public" a feeling that it was in the bed.
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Yes, it has happened that I have sometimes asked myself (in private silence, of course) whether the smooth ice of superficiality does not have enough joy, and that the great swallows in these spaces are only terrible wakes which, compared to the agile princess and heartlessly threatening with superior power, will in the end become the cold room of beauty.
So small a strip bears, the other breaks, and all the incomparably large gapes with the same dark death which, unchanging with cold upon cold, only imitates itself.
To raise one's hand then with a light-year pound and demonstrate the fugue of eternity on terrible organs, while the girl in the icy distance dances, hardly greater to see than a fly flown away towards the light, it is to chill with the great weapon as when the superpower with the powers the element hides coldly makes its rows in the land of Gond against unsuspecting cities and, although itself dismissing all talk of sin punishment and trial, nevertheless treats the human with such terrible flame that this terrible torrent of loose gamma released by those who do not mean sin punishment nevertheless cruelly destroys both Yaal and Gena and melts down to ashes the wonder Heba
With the same fire they turned on Chebeba.
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Posterity does not understand you so easily.
It judges according to the image of posterity
and counts up the time you lived in
as rows of negligence, as offenses
against the spirit of foresight, the duties of thought.
To this it adds the work of suffering
and piles up, as blind as a judge
as you were blind as a criminal, case by case.
Can those who have killed the foundations of joy and destroyed the great city of joy have the right to the joys of life?
Does Cain have the right to be happy?
Can those who strangled the joys of Xinombra and burned the valley of paradise have the right to heights of heaven other than Aniara's daily agony?
I ask but never get an answer. I have to arrange for pastimes
for the hordes of Aniara and manage its entertainment.
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A wave of newly awakened hatred swept through the mountains where Nobia lived in deep mines and ghostly white lights illuminated every thread of life in the fabrics she wove.
She had sought and found the thread of life - a discovery of how healing rays are empowered by the inner council of things and fused with the heart of the atom.
And while hatred swelled around the mountains
and wounds screamed in the valley of time.
she wove day and night until the color of victory
and the skin of life rose in the hall of death.
Of her beauty little can be said. It was lost in a wave of radiation but the clear purity of the soul could be weighed; in healed wounds we saw her reflection.
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Then I will throw you out of your chair. I will break your armchair view, because it is false and holds a convulsive security in a time that has slipped out of its rooms, but also the other way around: that it becomes a view without deep insight.
From this world, I shall send you happiness today to the kingdom of love, to the evil shore where the Samaritan Nobia and others spread works of love from country to country.
Figuring out the ways of evil and tracking down all the poison in the city of hate was futile, for hate stood there with heavy blocks united row by row.
Within its walls there was life and movement in the birthing centers and squares where human beings were conceived and human beings were born and human life in the human gap was destroyed. It was best to pretend that this city of self-righteous evil existed as nothing more than a devilish childhood that would mature, grow tired of itself.
We resolved to keep on sending saints there for the longest time.
from the saints' camps as long as the funds lasted
and as far as the need still aroused the heart.
This plan was tried for nine years, during which the Rind camp of saints bled to death: an act of self-sacrifice based on faith in the powers of good. But the heavy wall of hate stood just as hard, and the fatigue of leadership followed the act of hate; only too great was the throne of victory we had.
A single city consumed the power which we had thought sufficient for the transformation of the world.
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On a rare occasion, the happiness of being free from desire also came.
Then the emptiness suddenly became populated by a kind of spiritualized mystery.
We walked the spirit's path of happiness along the beach, exchanging thoughts, making fortune cards.
It was evening and sunset in the sea.
Night fell, but the land of thought stood firm.
He woke up. She said: guess where.
I can't, he said. How did you get here? The same way you did: up the gravel path and then straight to the left among the cypresses. There was a dewy path the moonlight itself went there with light steps which I tried to imitate.
And when everything was past and the path was over
I managed to become a clear crystal and find you, my friend, on this path.
It is so transparently wonderful here.
We no longer exist. All that was is over.
Neither god nor devil here reaches us anymore and the end is the cruel parody of life.
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Where is the plain text?
This is what I'm looking for.
The one that fits but still gives song.
After thanking God that he was a wasp and not something else, he continued between the leafy branches and stung the farmer.
Laid out by spiritual mobs, the truth becomes worse than the lie. When the mob washes the barley, it is never clean.
The rabble always wash in the dunghill from the Augean stables.
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Matema's camel bells ring in the deserts of speech where the caravans of unfinished quarrels
never reach their oasis, only become more camels.
Immersed as in a dream but still awake, I found myself changed and so naked that no dream has words for what it was like when, transformed by the stone, I cut down towards the inner realms and while this was happening I became smaller, smaller and even more stripped of layers and layers of time and space as I sank further and further into the stone, deeper and deeper into things.
Who undressed me, wore me down so much that no conceivable smallness so small on this earth can be imagined unless one is long since beyond what every comprehensible thought wants to deny.
And yet I was being stripped and reduced still further in no direction.
So sunk, unceasingly sunk in
towards even more breathtaking reduction
I retained in my dream a way of seeing
and understand that I was traveling into
to the dimensions, the innermost
who with their interior work with their interior
and whose interiors compose the world.
They scare children with darkness, criminals with punishment and sinners with realms beyond death where the vengeful desire to torment has transported its arsenal of tormenting images.
But sorrow follows us every day, and joy follows us every day.
We ourselves are the sorrow, we are also the joy, everything human is rooted in humanity, and no human being can escape humanity, not her hatred and her self-degradation, nor the joy she spreads, nor the love she forms.
There is a third land that is not death and not life, but the reality that pervades all realities, and spins the very thread of the fabric from which dreams are woven. Yes, I had come to the rooms where these threads are spun. When I arrived, I stepped out and saw no longer surprised the smallest fairy, who herself was not at all surprised to welcome me to her inner land.
And although we were both unimaginably smaller than two grains of traveling dust on a suit on earth, we thought we were big here in this smallest room to which I have now come and which nevertheless encloses with its vault a separate world of realities formed.
On the contrary, I cannot describe what I saw of strange things, but that will follow when the habit of telling stories has been practiced for other habits than what life offers,
and other things than those called death.
For though beyond all I have known
this was not death
and though within all I have known
this was not life.
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Actually, the comprehensibility was slight, as when multiples arranged in layers, and layered in the directions of space, make the fabric of the dream omnidirectional structural and become a fabric consisting of paths where the thread is only thought of as a path as a sign that here the shuttle has gone, but where is the thread? The thread is the path. I saw how the gnome was in a quandary as to which of two different possibilities to give clarity.
Then came formulas of such an elusive nature that the gnome was again gripped by the anxiety
which arises when the explanation is attempted but little response is felt by the pupil.
And with a look that shone as if with sorrow, he signaled a break in the dilemma. And with a formula more magical than comprehensible, we left the atom.
We expanded to other contexts and sat on a leaf next to a bee eagerly searching for honey in a meadow.
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The Dance
Around the great star of the day we shall orbit the years we have been given to live, and our family for a few thousand centuries, perhaps more, perhaps less, no one knows.
But the time that we are orbiting is so small compared to that of the suns where they wander around in orbits in the galaxy our family named the Milky Way, luminous to behold.
What can our eyes see, our hearts cry out at the thought of atoms going around in the same way with waves and particles.
Some have called this the dance of the gods - it is always being danced by everything in the universe.
All indications are that among the arts of the muses
the art of dance is the first and the last,
and we are in it, dancing out
our role in the dance, it is already being danced
in other worlds separate from our time,
in other dance theaters,
yet one thing is clear
that we are dancing our turns.
Our role in it
is ours and no one else's.
Our own role in the dance art of all worlds.
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Economic overview
Our earth wanders alive alone, around the sun our dear parent.
As far as the giant tubes reach no living neighbor to see.
Desolate and empty on the one who received the name of the god of war, burning hot and desolate on the one who received the name of the goddess of love.
Jupiter, planet of Zeus
ice-clad to two hundred times the height of the Himalayas.
The others are death's door.
Beyond that, light years to the next planetary village.
So each sun has only one living person, and that one is a leased farm, indefinitely and to an unreliable and dangerous race.
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Here is a world of light distributed in the mystery of things.
Here is the salvaged light in the innumerable rooms of the stone.
Wands point with poles directed to their rooms inside mountains and stones, spinning mystery.
Deep in her fairy tale, she lives for the sake of the tale.
the norn who has learned to spin the yarn from the wool of the riddles.
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The spirit of Ideema from space in endless lines gathered the seeds into the durable wood of the suns.
From far beyond time the hydrogen came in modest garb and built for its God the ingenious nests of the atoms.
Come, let us nurture the foundation of our life. The green sphere we have been given to live on in the universe's lottery system.
When the next lucky draw can get rid of the Milky Way's big tombola we do not know and can never reach.
But we do know one thing for sure: the next draw will not include us.
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A stranger called chance shuffles the cards and deals them to the local players.
Every single poker face keeps a straight face.
There are plenty of goldfish in the tureen here.
According to the law, the silent coincidence itself is the last to raise its hand, with ice in its stomach.
Soon jaws of granite are chewing the cigar.
Where is the bundle of happiness among the starlings?
That question is answered when chance wins.
Then the shot goes off, chance's life disappears. His house of cards collapses, but soon everyone at the counter thinks it was a nice fish, that no one won, that chance herself was told by Smith and Wesson what chance was.
by Smith and Wesson what chance should do.
( translation to be continued )