This Sandbox is now out of use. The new Sandbox can be found here.
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You found a CSS Sandbox!
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Alas, you are too good at this! My hiding-things plan is foiled.
Here's an orange for your troubles: 🍊Personally, I'd call it a "tangerine."
Congratulations! You found another secret!
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— Full Spectrum Hex Catalogue —
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660066
cc00cc
ff00ff
ff66ff
ff99ff
ffccff
ff99cc
ff66cc
ff33cc
cc0099
800080
990099
cc3399
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ff6699
ff0066
d60093
993366
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a50021
cc0000
ff5050
ff7c80
ff9999
ffcccc
ffcc99
ff9966
ff6600
ff0000
800000
990000
ff3300
ff9933
ffcc66
ffcc00
cc6600
993300
cc3300
ff9900
996600
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663300
cc9900
ffff00
ffff66
ffff99
ffffcc
ccff99
ccff6
ccff33
cccc00
996633
808000
99cc00
99ff33
99ff66
66ff33
669900
666633
333300
009900
336600
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003300
008000
33cc33
66ff66
99ff99
ccffcc
99ffcc
ccff99
00ff00
00cc00
006600
339933
00cc66
00ff99
66ffcc
00ffcc
00cc99
339966
008080
009999
006666
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003366
006699
33cccc
00ffff
66ffff
ccffff
66ccff
33ccff
00ccff
0099cc
336699
3366cc
0066cc
0099ff
3399ff
0066ff
0033ff
0033cc
003399
000099
0000ff
0000cc
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000066
3333ff
3366ff
6699ff
99ccff
ccecff
ccccff
9999ff
6666ff
3333cc
333399
666699
6600ff
9966ff
cc99ff
cc66ff
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6600cc
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— Code —
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This is an example colourful sentence.
This is an example colourful sentence.
This is an example colourful sentence.
This colour blends in with the top of a page.
This colour blends in with the middle and bottom of a page.
Using div
allows for multiple lines
of the same colour.
##a50021|This is an example colourful sentence.##
##008000|This is an example colourful sentence.##
##009999|This is an example colourful sentence.##
##ecf2ee|This colour blends in with the top of a page.##
##fcfcfc|This colour blends in with the middle and bottom of a page.##
[[div style="color:#ff0055;"]]
Using div
allows for multiple lines
of the same colour.
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— How Hex Codes Work —
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Numbers run 0-9, letters run A-F. The letters are stand-ins for numbers, letting us use base 16 instead of base 10. (E.g., think of "A" as the number 10, "B" as 11, and so on). Finally, the first number is more important than the second number in any given pair. The closer a code is to #000000, the closer it is to black; the closer it is to #ffffff, the closer it is to white.
If you want to know how to convert to RGB on your own: multiply the first digit in a pair by 16 and the second by 1, then sum the products to get the amount of R, G, or B that that pair represents. Doing this for all three pairs in a hex code gives you the full RGB for that code!
Take this hex code for example: #0b0143.- The first pair of letters/numbers (0b) refers to how much Red there is. Without calculating, we can already see that there is not much Red here.
- The second pair of letters/numbers (01) refers to how much Green there is. There is barely any Green in this colour.
- The third pair of letters/numbers (43) refers to how much Blue there is. There is quite a bit of Blue in this colour.Indeed, if we check, our observations are accurate:
Knowing how hex codes work allows you to make good codes, accurately assess changes in hex values, and to make on-the-fly edits of site colours without the use of special tools.
Now you know how to read hex codes (and edit them accurately)!
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— Common Links —
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- Colour Inspiration: [Common Hex Values]
- HEX to RGB / RGB to HEX: [HEX/RGB RapidTable]
- Accessibility / Contrast Checker: [Accessibility & Contrast Checker].
This is an example of how you can hide fcfcfc text against fcfcfc background. Well done finding this!
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1. [19:54]Stygian Blue:
Rat going toward the light -> rat in the river -> fish below, rat sleepy -> rat dreams? -> rat steps off the river later than expected -> rat farther away from the light than how it started -> rat despair -> light goes out -> terror -> stubborn hope in finding a new world -> and then the world moves on
2. [19:55]melted_bee:
I have a specific image I want to include, which is the light shining through some sort of dust storm or fallout
3. [19:56]Stygian Blue:
PERFECT. Apocalypse has been heavily pointed towards with "it's happened out there" eyes looking meaningfully in that direction
4. [19:57]melted_bee:
What I was thinking in terms of structure is that the rats and light take note of each other, but over time their paragraphs begin to reference the other in a more reverential way, almost ending in a sort of love story until the light goes out and things move on. Also, the light is kind of a reactive character to your rats
1. Stygian Blue:
I like your idea of the rat and light never meeting physically but instead meeting through overlapping thoughts/same-track thoughts and half-telepathy. Let’s do it.
1. 17:26]melted_bee:
Yes! I think it would be incredible to do a back and forth. With one paragraph being the light and the other the rat and so on
The city could not remember that it was a city. But a city it was – if only to you.
You know this instinctively, even if the city does not. You wander the jagged terrain, belly full and swaying, fur thick and sticky, feeling your heartbeat in your limbs, your tail, the flea-chewed tufts of your ears. Your heartbeat is you, and it suffuses you: you are so small, and your heart so large, that it composes more of you than your lungs, your mind, your spirit combined. You are your heart, and so when you bound over the rubbish and the mushroom-soaked decay and the gasline runoff (slick and darkly moist like rotten cake in your fur, but it would make your belly hurt if you licked it off, so move on with whiskers bristling, mind plotting a way to the river) your heart is so big it feels as though it would burst. But don’t let it. Not yet.
It takes hours to get to where you need to be. The heat and light on the horizon is not the sun, and the buzzing and humming velocity that filled the wires and people so short a time ago have quietened. You stop at last at the gurgling river, the overflowing river, the waste-dump river, the river-rat river: thin squeaks greet your presence from invisible cavities in the ever-shifting river terrain, and you greet them back with friendly whiskers (keeping an eye on your footing, as you are not so sure of the stability of the ground as your friends – you are a city rat, always were, even after the city has forgotten). A pungent wave of aerosolized urine meets your nose – it smells of fish, decay (when does it not? Decay is as natural to you as the city having forgotten its name), the chipping skin of those huge things swimming downriver where drinking the water turns one thirsty and dry – something that holds no significance or meaning to you but is of near-worship by the river rats. All this you learn from the smells, the sounds, the squeaks and curious chirrups of your waterborne peers.
You exchange news with the locals, as you pass by. Ask them the direction you can travel on the river to get closer to the never-downing blaze on the horizon. Thank them with the scraping-off of the cake-like oil you acquired earlier from your fur – the river rats have use of it, one you cannot fathom, and they tell you with nudges and pressed-together warming bodies to come again. And then you move on, tail flushed and ears pricked and heart so beautiful and bright in your chest, and you are nudged onto a flat-topped ovular platform with a smooth droopy fabric attached in a triangle near the middle, and set off toward the purple, never-changing heat and light on the horizon.
The sky is beautiful, crisscrossed with arouras of orange and speckled gold and glassy streamline red. The clouds are huge, thick, enveloping, like a hundred rats were sitting atop a flexible sheet and you were looking at the underside – lumpy and almost moving, if you squinted. Which you did, because you were awake.
You don’t look around because you don’t have to see in order for the world to filter into your conscious mind. Behind you is the bulging horizon now – the river is swift, the wind buffets your fur, tugs you and your raft back (where did you learn that word?), though its pressure is warm, insistent but not angry or volatile as the wind so often is. It doesn’t really feel like the wind at all, you think dimly, and somewhere in your neocortex sparks a line of thought leading inevitably to your life here ending. But for now, you don’t see that, aren’t aware of that, and you live your short life here in peace.
Trees drift by.
You look around, eats twitching and whiskers outstretched like claw-fingered hands from your face. Your raft rocks beneath you, and at last you realize something that has been bothering you ever since you opened your eyes: the light you have been following is above you. It is the bulging on the clouds, the hooded light illuminating the sky like a thousand lanterns cloaked in silk by the clouds. And you are in the middle of the river, ready to reach it.
Its light sparkles in the waves. Draw closer to the edge, your raft drifting gratefully into the warm arms of a whirlpool, and stare at the reflection of the light in the sky in the deep black waves, like neon illuminating a midnight street.
You do not smell like anything. Does this not bother you?
How did you get here?
And then, almost without thinking, topple headfirst into the waves. Feel no cold shock, no airless gasp, no plummeting of your temperature as water rushes into your lungs. Because you aren't really here.
You awaken as yourself with a gasp, a rat-gasp, a small-furred-beast gasp, a prey-gasp.
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Under the brilliant orange sky: an autumn sun.
Step one: Wander the city. Taste the twisting roads, smell the spaghetti-curls of backdoor alleys — the sweet-sour cigarette reek of employees-only entrances, roundabouts, and rusted-over fire escapes attached with string and wire to gleaming steel and balanced precariously over centuries-old wooden foundations. You: feel the crunch of glass under your feet, the crush of hypodermics breaking and not piercing the steel plates in your soles. Pass the bus station, the man knocked out by his own willpower and methodology collapsed like a downed powerline beside it – catalogue the names of security guards passing by, checking not their upturned noses but their company names, their leash-holders. Check and memorize their habits, that they are posted notably outside some businesses but not others.
Pass the bus stop. Pass the man. Pass the security people. Keep your poise steady, bored, nonthreatening.
Walk inside without suspicion.
Step two:
Your backpack clinks. Step lightly. Keep your mind off of it — delude yourself the best you can, for now.
WORDS GO HERE
Step ten: Walk away from a blooming ball of fire like the setting sun.
They commit arson and a bombing and it is never explicitly named. This is a step-by-step on red flags.
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This is a work in progress. This is messy, unfinished, and not good yet. The content may not make sense and may contradict itself or feel out of order. Tenses may change, capitalizations may be inconsistent, and punctuation is not a guarantee. This is unpolished granite. You have been warned.
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2
A City Called Regret
Once upon a time, there was a city called Regret. It was about the size of a small barn.
Regret was fairly normal, as far as cities go. Regret had all of the features of its larger siblings, just tucked in a little more closely: it had gleaming skyscrapers, squat brick factories, crooked corner stores, and plenty of libraries. A grocery store, a farmer’s market full of overpriced organic and homemade goods that came and went with the weeks and with about the regularity of the tides – though the tides, nowadays, are easy to measure. Perhaps, then, a better analogy for the market would be migration times for large birds.
But this isn’t about the farmer’s market, nor is it about the strange envelopes that appeared on sellers’ doorsteps a day in advance – always exactly a day, varying so little by the hour and minute that some tried to watch for their appearance. Nobody minded the irregularity of the market, of course. After all, what would a farmer’s market be if one could know when it would happen?
Such mysteries as the farmer’s market were not meant to be known by the common folk. But this is not about the letters.
Regret’s residents, like the farmer’s market with all its pentacled goat horns and crimson goose down cloaks, were normal, after a fashion.
But all of this is trivial, truly. Regret, a city the size of a barn, would go on ticking the way that cities do. It is said, after all, that forests are the most stable ecosystems on the planet, and a city is little more than a metallic woodland.
One should not expect all places and people in a story to experience some manner of change. Some places are immaterial, inconsequential, even when they are the center focus of the story. This is because this story is not about the city, really, even though the city is our hero.
This story is about vultures.
There are vultures in Regret, flying high overhead. Their beaks are sharp, their eyes bloody, and they have heavy, oily feathers that droop on the downstroke and snap off on the upstroke of their flight, regrowing with the oil that seeps from the broken shafts to form feathers anew, making for a constant blackish rain of tar and sooty keratin. These vultures emit noxious gasses as they fly, pushing themselves with helium and aerosolized tritium and whatever else it is they use to remain airborne. They are not natural creatures, like the rest of us: they are a tragedy, a sickening, sorrowful blemish flying high, the aftermath of the experiments of some horrible scientist who decided that the best way to save the now-extinct California Vulture was to equip the first flock of these otherwise-peaceful birds with jetpacks. These vultures, in their purest form, were scavengers. These ones, it seems – still the first flock, largely, but also their children, equipped with the best genetic engineering could cook up for them – are not, in fact, scavengers. Their talons are wet, hooked like those of eagles, and their beaks carry serrated edges sharp as a diamond knife. These vultures are not scavengers, and they are always hungry.
The city called Regret lies far below these vultures, shifting and shaking in its ever-changing ways, trembling each morning and evening with the inrushing and outwashing of the barrage of tidewaters, brown and black and filled with sludge and outpouring sewage from exposed drainage tunnels that lead to the ocean and splash brackish water onto the steaming city streets.
The city called Regret is the only thing left, you know. Its ocean is a testament to that. Surrounding the barn-sized city a thousand miles deep, a thousand miles tall, and a scant few feet on each border, is something dead. That something dead is the drying fourth-dimensional ocean at the city’s port – an ocean that flickers and flashes with fish one moment, clear water the next, and choking tangles of seaweed and plastic debris after that. The locals of the city, considerate as they are, always wait, litter held in wavering stacks that cast shadows like the bars of a jail cell door across the beach, standing patiently all in line at the border of the city and sea, only toppling their towers of rubbish when the sea finally curdles, spews, and gargles itself into the garbage-filled waste that is its third state of being. The city officials, of course, discourage this practice, but it is not uncommon to see officials in embroidered finery at the rubbish-clearing festivals too.
This may lead you
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To the vulture who awaits the sun: Hello. Don't be scared.
And one day when your corpse grows warm with mold the ferns will rise, damply green and glorious in the sun, and cry spores of gold for your passing.
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My name is
Stygian Blue. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
⠀My name is [[*user Stygian Blue]]. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
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∴
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= [[size 150%]]**∴**[[/size]] = [[size 120%]]**✧⠀⠀⠀✦⠀⠀⠀✧**[[/size]]
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[[=image https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/639887625381216313/1011767652819140758/QcVoNLmtT4CqgH_dShP39A.jpg width="400px"]]
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Content goes here!
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The code below has spaces between the brackets and include tags ( [[include is how it should be). Make sure to remove them when you copy the code! (Or, if you want to make sure that you get it right, open the Source of this page and copy from there — I have an instance hidden right at the top (before the Tabview) so it's easy to find.)[[ include :scp-wiki:component:coltop | show= Show1 | hide= Hide1 ]] Content goes here! [[ include :scp-wiki:component:coltop | show= Show2 | hide= Hide2 ]] Content goes here! [[ include :scp-wiki:component:coltop | show= Show3 | hide= Hide3 ]] Content goes here! [[ include :scp-wiki:component:coltop | show= Show4 | hide= Hide4 ]] Content goes here! [[ include :scp-wiki:component:colend]] [[ include :scp-wiki:component:colend]] [[ include :scp-wiki:component:colend]] [[ include :scp-wiki:component:colend]]
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LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT
RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT
[[table style="width:95%"]] [[row]] [[cell style="width:45%;padding:15px;vertical-align:text-top;text-align:justify"]] LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT LEFT [[/cell]] [[cell style="width:45%;padding:15px;vertical-align:text-top;text-align:justify"]] RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT RIGHT [[/cell]] [[/row]] [[/table]]
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This is messy, unfinished, and mostly exists for me to keep myself in check so I don't have to go retcon a bunch of stuff later. This is not edited or polished. Tenses may change, capitalizations may be inconsistent, and punctuation is not a guarantee. You have been warned.
Definitions:
- Rela: A planet.
- Universe 68: The universe that holds the planet called Rela. A magic-laden universe. The product of good universe RNG.
- Mages: Winged humanoids, some "immortal" (ageless, not invulnerable) and some not. All magic users — however, like language, if they are not taught magic they will not be able to use it, and the level of proficiency varies wildly even within those skilled in its use, with proficiency and ability depending on what type(s) of magic they were schooled in, how skilled they are in adapting their runes to the current world they are in (read: how much firepower they are capable of packing), and how proficient they are with their magic in the first place.
- Relan magic: Energy transfer magic.
- Runes: The building blocks of magic. Physical shapes. These shapes can be naturally found in plants, animals, and some bacteria that originates on Rela.
- Modifiers: Small, simple runes that modify the expression of other runes.
- Sequences: A line of runes and modifiers with an unfixed power source and destination. Versatile, but requires setup to use. Think of it like a flamethrower: it has the parts, but needs fuel and someone to hold it.
- Theorems: Several sequences fixed to a set power source and location with one specific application in mind. Usually does not require human intervention to function.- "Fixed" magic: Set to an energy source and/or destination. Synonymous with "keyed" or "keying".
- "Keying" magic: Setting a sequence to an energy source and/or destination.- "Sparking": Setting a sequence or theorem to a power source and activating it.
- How magic works: Relan magic has no verbal components and works like computer code. If someone wanted to make an apple on a table very hot, they would have to use, at the very least, a temporal rune with modifiers to describe when it was, a spacial rune with modifiers to describe where it is in reference to a fixed point in space, a heat rune with modifiers to describe the original heat of the apple and how hot it was to become relative to that original heat, a sapping rune to describe from where the heat would come, and safeguarding modifiers to ensure that the heat sap was not endless and to stop functioning if the apple got too hot. Treat the magic as close as you can to physical code that works on physics instead of on digital stuff and you'll be set.
- Most mages have at least one fixed light -producing sequence tattooed or implanted somewhere on their body that runs on body heat. This is one of the first things a Relan child will be taught how to create — think of it as the "Hello, World!" of magic. Seen as a mark of pride for apprentice Mages to get implanted, and almost always differs in exact technique of sequence between users (some will have it written elegantly and simply, others will have a messy, convoluted scrawl all the way up their arm, etc).- Implanted vs tattooed magic: This one is simple: Tattoos fade. The main three ways for a Mage to make magic stable and portable on their body are by drawing it on their skin (with a marker), tattooing it on, or implanting it. Tattoos can take less fine detail before they get too small and start smudging (like real tattoos — look up 'fine line tattoo aging'!) but are less invasive to get than implants. Implants are by far the most stable and can take damage to the skin + can hold far more detail (think: can be smaller and therefore an individual can hold more sequences ready on their body) but require surgery to get and are liable to all the problems that real-life implants have, including infections, rejection, movement, and discomfort.
- You will often see mages with unfixed tattoo or implant sequences use pen ink to fix their sequences to the nearest power source on the fly.- The purpose of unfixed sequence tattoos: Relan magic doesn't work off-world because it can't "see" stars in other universes, so mages who go off-world a lot keep unfixed tattoos, implants, etc of their most-used sequences on their bodies. When not on Rela, this magic runs on whatever the mage has keyed it to, the most common being the mage's own body heat or batteries carried in the pocket. For this reason of limited power supply, Mages are far less effective off-world unless they key their magic to that specific world (i.e., they start sapping from stars), which is difficult to do if that universe's occupants do not know where the stars are relative to the rest of everything.
- Relan magic is "lossless" (i.e., it takes exactly as much energy in as it puts out, regardless of the distance of the power source relative to the sequence and affected object) To get the sequence started takes as much energy as it would take for it to run for one full second. On Rela, though smaller sequences largely work off of power sources, the biggest magic runs on starpower. There is the underlying assumption that so long as their own star is not sapped from, there are no consequences for snuffing out stars. Plus, stars are so huge that it would take them billions upon billions upon billions of years to sap them all.
""
The people there abused the Way system, trying to make an Open Way that would be programmable and eternally open. This basically forced all the Ways in the universe to only generate in that one specific spot. Because the Ways are forced to generate so often and in one place for so long, it is now extremely rare for a functioning Way to occur (and even rarer for people to know how to use it — Knocks are demoted to being knowledge obsolete).Consider having this: The magic of this world is "lossless," which means that there is no energy lost over distance or time for this magic. This is Not Good when used in universes that have inflexible laws of thermodynamics (which is to say, most universes), which has led to the people who know how to program world eater sequences to be preemptively unable to access the Library (partially because the way the people of that world learned to make those was not through rigorous study, but by visiting the Library through the Open Way and looking it up in books which had yet to exist about their universe).
""
Roughly chronological history of Rela:
- Life begins on Rela.
- Life takes the shapes of runes, occasionally. Without modifiers, these do not work or have no limits. It is an infinitesimally small chance that life would adapt the right shapes to form the modifiers it would need to prosper from being rune-shaped, and life does not make that chance. Life evolves on without being rune-shaped.
- History goes on much like our own. Rela is a largely oceanic world, with small islands splattered across its surface and very few large landmasses. It has relatively weak gravity and a strong oxygen-rich atmosphere. Birds and other flying things are extremely common; however, flying apes do not evolve due to needing a large body to support a large brain. The apes learn to make boats. Life goes on.
- Humans happen. Enter usual human history, with a higher focus on travel, higher focus on borders due to limited landmass, and increased focus on navigation by stars.
- The Library is discovered, waygates too. Some Relans go through, inquire around, and go back to Rela. With this comes a sudden influx of knowledge, science, and culture. Enter an extremely rapid industrial-solarpunk revolution with skyscraping forest cities, deep underground laboratories, and massive leaps in technological development. Following this, someone goes back and looks up Universe 68 in the Library and discovers latent magic of their universe. They try thousands of methods at one of the best research universities there is, and they succeed with one of them.
- - During this time, not all are happy with the way things are going. There are many parts of the world where magic has already been discovered, for instance, and there are cultures and traditions with runics laced throughout.
- - Between the beginning of the solar revolution and the reign of magic, there is a development of bio-augmentation. Relans bring back with them information and technology for bioengineering, and instead of making planes they develop ways to design themselves after the other creatures on the planet. It does not work for all, but most generations of Relans born after that time have light bones, muscular torsos, and a short stature: the perfect frame for giving one the ability to fly. Wings are manufactured and implanted in those who can afford it (few) or those who are willing to sell themselves into service for their island grouping. Many other medical advancements happen during this time, both foul and beautiful.
- - The south, east, north, and west are fully connected by transisland thermal searail, huge connecting poles strung beneath the waves to guide fliers on days when the stars aren't out. Compasses don't work, as the magnetic fields are always shifting — this is why electricity, for instance, is not well established. The lack of navigational ability outside of searail and line-of-sight then provides the start of a desperate need for better methods of navigation, and the start of flight provides a desire to go farther than the clouds. But without a means of surviving without oxygen, there is no way beyond the upper atmosphere without death. Which leads us to…
- Enter the reign of magic. It is an explosive process. The field develops quickly. Magic is taught as a core subject in schools and colleges. As knowledge of magic deepens through in-universe thaumatic exploration, it becomes standard for one person to only know deeply one or two rune types (think of it like having a major in college). With this comes the exportation of skilled Relan Mages for suitable tasks off-world, but their magic is not as effective off-world, so most return home after a few years away due to a sort of homesickness partially caused by a lack of access to power.
- With more scientific advancements comes the charting of the positions of stars relative the pinpoint universal coordinates of the center of Universe 68, where the Big Bang originally occurred. With this knowledge, Mages in Universe 68 can key their sequences and theorems to sap not from short-term power sources but from stars, providing a near-limitless supply of power to their structures. Think of it like if someone brought a 2098 supercomputer to the 1980's.
- Sequence tattoos and implants with unkeyed power sources become popular in the younger generations of Mages as off-world travel continues.
- Off-world travel is still restricted to whichever Waygates are active that day and wherever they are naturally keyed to. Additionally, there is still the worry of getting stranded in another universe due to the local Waygate closing or changing destinations. The pioneering researchers and academics of Rela join forces to make a permanent two-way Waygate that can be made to connect to any universe the user wishes.
- With much effort and energy, they successfully create a fixed Waygate, through which many mages leave Rela to wander the Library and beyond, as there is no longer a worry of being stranded or in a place one does not wish to be. Many more, however, stay, and treat the other universes like one would treat a new continent: interesting, worth visiting once, not worth sticking around in, maybe good for trade.
- Time passes. Navigational difficulties are discovered in the fixed Waygate, but nobody is quite sure of what is happening.
- Meanwhile, the fixed Waygates are using energy as they function, due to being connected to "lossy" worlds. This concept was unfamiliar to the mages who created the Open Way, so they had no safeguards built against it. Stars wink out one by one in Universe 68, and it is too late when the academics, in panic and fear, shut off the theorem making the Open Way.
- Due to the recent (forced) waygates and loss of methods for discovering natural ones since people adapted to using the convenient ones, natural Waygates are rare. Very few people travel in or out of Rela now, and a good portion of Mages find themselves stranded outside Rela. Those stranded can still use their magic, but it is not very effective due to a lack of sufficient power (think: being keyed to a star network that doesn't exist in the universe they are in) and being in "lossy" worlds. Those with sequences keyed to Rela find themselves unable to work magic, while those with unkeyed sequences adapt.
- The Tome is made off-world by a group of Mages stranded in the Library. Their goal: to search for Rela and stranded Mages.
- On Rela, some people leave via a renewed forced Waygate sketched up from recovered drafts of the theorem. The nearest stars and, at last, tSun winks out with no fanfare. With few people on Rela, very few with the innate magic are born and fewer still remain with knowledge of how to work the advanced sequences that were once commonplace. Almost everyone with intact knowledge lives off-world and dares not key to starpower. Some still do, of course, and with the fragmented knowledge of safeguarding modifiers comes disastrous consequences to the many universes. Mage populations are on the decline, with a scattered few making their way on Rela and a larger but still scattered and scant few surviving on half-forgotten runes keeping them alive off-world.
- Rela now lives perpetual: a rare world to travel to, cold and anarchic and bursting at the seams with deadly magic and glittering hostile possibilities.
This tab is all the stuff I'm unwilling to delete but also unwilling to save. This content may be poorly written, unfinished, or poorly executed. If you are looking for good content, look elsewhere, as this place is not for you. You have been warned.
Warm Tide
You found her on the shore. A leviathan of flesh and blood, marbled white and blotched with seeping rivulets of red, larger and grander than anything you had ever known in her debased glory. Bloated and warming she sat, stinking in the grey sand, waiting eyeless and finless for the inevitable congregation of hermit crabs and seagulls.
When you saw her, you knew without words that she was a mother. The depth she reached now was not her own. She knew it, wore the invasion of a new space like a banner on her stretched-taut skin, her gelatinous body too powerful for a world of so little pressure. But even still, she was a mother.
What would she birth from herself, when the time came? A squirming thing, perhaps, unable to see or to cry, dying within minutes with lungs pink and a blowhole bloody? Or would it be a leviathan-child, dark-skinned with eyes like milk-marble, inborn grace on display for all to bear as it danced, punctured her rotten womb and slipped knife-skinned into the sea, only remembered by those who saw, scant surgeons they were, in the most terrible of dreams?
Or maybe she came to bear herself for the world, bringing nothing. If so, to whom would she give herself and her godhood?
By the time the tides retreated again she was gone, her fervent admirers vanished. But the memory of her lingered on the shore, sat heavy and made itself known in yellowed dreams and in the great song of foghorns turned to plaintive warbles calling across the bay. Some, unsatisfied with memory alone, searched. Others, in terror, blinded themselves. But for everyone the result was the same: she did not return, at least in body. Her mind and memory, however, stayed so you could become part of the aftermath.
That night, you dreamt of her basking on the beach under the moon, in company with her children. The young were squirming things, wriggling and writhing, blind-eyed and bulging in her softness. They nestled within her ribs, suckled upon her fermented flesh, and you watched as they tore strip after wet strip, chewed with beaks and serrated teeth, with ragged wings and claws, stealing ribbons of godhood for themselves. In your dream, you watched from above, and oh how you longed to be with them. With your siblings in grace.
And then you awoke – everyone did. The sun was hot, the air was dry, and the beach was still clear. But between shifting sandbars of thought and isolas of rocky work, fathomless currents ebbed and flowed through your mind, pressure and numbness from the deep swelling like punctured arteries within your waking days. When you could, you stole back to the beach to stand in the shadow of her presence, that great expanse in the spot where no creature would tread, and remember.
Even now you still feel her call: a droning comfort arising from the dark and the unknown, a clarion song of death and ceremony. You know that soon it will fade. And you know that soon she will call again, and this time you will hear it, and you will finally swim with your siblings into the sea to carry her aloft and finally take a shred of her cadaverous godhood for yourself.
It was my second year in the sea. I was the captain of our submarine. We were sailing the abyssal rift, so our windows were blacked out. Who knows what we would have seen out there, and it was imperative that the “who knows” would never be given a name. And I felt a jolt, and felt a moment later through the soles of my boots the rumble of metal torn like tissue paper as the water outside roared into our vessel. The engine klaxon blared, and a terror of greater pressure than anything found in the water outside rose in my chest and pressed aside my lungs. Our worst fears were alive now.
Go, I ordered my crew. Take diving suits, as you will need them. Go out there, repair the walls. Nobody moved, and I raised my voice, switched tactics, and the water hammering at the bulkheads threatened to drown. Fix the engines; they are damaged. Tears ran down my cheeks, a tiny taste of the great and monstrous waterfall of darkness outside. You must save us. Run to the medical bay, find glue in case the engineers run out. Use the tape if you must. Please, everyone, listen to me. Come back. We need to work together.
And then I looked around and found myself in the engine room, a welding torch in one hand and surgical glue in the other. I felt, not saw, the drifting outside, and in that moment I realized that I was not the captain of this vessel.
Untitled Swamp Church
The chapel was dry. Not dry like the desert, but dry like a marsh on a summer day: humid, fragrant with bog-fumes, craggy with the black bones of skeletal trees and crinkling stalks of golden grass. Heavy sunlight streamed down from the stained glass above; I bent my head in reverence, but said no words. All words had already been spoken. All thoughts were gone, had fled as quickly as the starlings and swallows when the butterflies stopped taking off from the womb of the warm, sticky mud of the chapel floor.
No paving stones for the floor. No pews of hewn stone or rough-cut oak, like we had at home so long ago. No altar of crimson glass like frozen blood. No calming candles, no mourning statues, no shame-faced onlookers cut in lead silhouettes to catch the sun. This chapel was a disgrace. A long-forgotten hate.
My doorway stood behind me. I felt it there, sticky in the back of my mind, before that, too, faded. I did not need to turn around to know that it was gone.
The Reed Who Convinced the Sea
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Alt Title:
Where the Summer Smells of Citrus Blossoms
The sun was warm on my skin, and I sat. The doorway closed behind me: a soft thump and a whoosh of air, and it was gone.
The air was warmer than I would have liked, but nevertheless I drank it greedily, though it did not sate me the same way it once used to. The warmth of the air, though, I was grateful for: the syrupy heat filled my lungs and condensed like perspiration on my marbled skin, wet where I was dry.
At my side, entombed in thick stone that even I would not be able to lift — at least on my own — the reeds, thick and green and waving cheerfully. I tilted my head at them, considering slowly while the sun and the lake warmed my bones. At this, nor at anything else, did the reed comment. Perhaps it was common here, in this city park where not even the fish could live, for people to step from holes in the world and dip their feet in the water. Perhaps the reed knew that I would soon leave, too.
And a piece of the ocean it was.
Near the docks, with the rough heat of concrete and dry-splinter decay of the dock, the reeds were all there were. That, and the bounty of the waves, and the algae, and the smell of lake — something which I was not fond of, nor particularly familiar in recent history, but the smell of lake is not something one forgets. It is the same across all things without salt. A lake smells of oil runoff, of faint citrus like bleach and drain cleaner, and most overpoweringly of Water, because of course it does, because lakes are made of it. Lakes and their smell of Water smell of life, unlike the sea. Out at sea, one smells salt and brine and sea spray. Occasionally, too, one might taste through the salt on their curdled tongue the reek of heavy fuel oils or seaweed lost from shore or decaying fish, but more often than not the ocean smells and tastes clean. Not so with lakes, because lakes are small and porous; filled with life and teeming with decay in all stages and in the smallest possible space. They are a water droplet turned green, in comparison to the sea, and they smell the same: a lake smells of aquatic plants, of desecrated skeletal fish, of silt, of mud, of muck, of fertilizer, of algae. Like water bugs and frog skin and bacteria. Like plant fibers crushed between the fingers, staining green the skin and dripping through the creases of one's fingers. That is what a lake smells like.
I shook myself, hairs on my arms raised in goosebumps, and focused on the present. Here, so far from home the distance was not just insurmountable but impossible,, an alien sun blazed overhead, the breeze was thick with warm mist grown from cycling water across the globe, and distant cities and mountaintops could be seen not just by the spots of light from those atop them, but from their blue-tinted shadows too, their watercolour impressions staining green and cyan against the bright horizon. Blue, like the sea at dawn — aside from the Sun, somehow, it was the water I missed most of all. Even lying on the dock, some part of me longed for the kick and roll of the sea. I thought that I would have grown tired of it by now, but my nose ached for the smell of brine and sea, and my skin felt slick and uncomfortably oily without a crusting of salt to leach the moisture away.
Perhaps that was why I found myself where I was now. Before me in a bright and alien place so far from home lay a rippling lake of incredible size, shores too far to see through the low-lying smog cascading from the cities of gold in the mountains. In the valley-bound lake before me, a thousand tiny ripples churned mouldy brown waters, and though I missed the dark and salty abyss of my homeland, I found an appreciation in my cool, still heart for the familiarity — a warmth that could, for a time, hold love for this strange, distant fragment of ocean.
“Little reed, I am a curious creature, and my mind stops for nothing," I said. My voice was not rough, but the sound was uncomfortable in the air, and not just in the way that one's voice often sounds to oneself. I pressed on: "It has been many days since I last spoke to anything, and you seem good company. I must ask — why are you here, in this pond where nothing grows but cattails and algae? I am no expert, but you seem better suited for wild marshes and estuaries. This place is not a place for you, so why do you try?”
At my speech, the reed seemed to laugh, its leaves scraping across each other in much the same way a cricket’s legs do when it wants to sing. A lush, foresty sound, green and true, that rang out across the manmade pond and through the hot dead air. “That is no way to start a conversation,” chortled the reed. It swayed in the oily rainbow of its enclosure, then twisted about itself in introspection. “I know not even your name, and you not mine. Though I will tell you, because you have taken the kindness of speaking to me. Not many do.”
Was it such a kindness? I turned to my side, avoiding the gaze of the reed. I hadn’t done anything special.
The reeds drifted in their submerged pools for a time, considering. A series of leaves fell from the golden skeletal tree overhead — one handed on my bare chest, and the fiery red of autumn blazed there against my white marble, a lone candle in a pool of wax, or a burning in a chapel. The remnants of change finally falling from the world.
At last, the reeds spoke. "
But perhaps my perception was skewed away from myself. It had been too long since I last considered my circumstances. I had indeed been travelling for some time, and would travel again — the reeds were correct on that front. It was also true that I was exhausted, and yet could not rest. Did this make me someone for whom the reeds should feel sorry? It felt wrong, somehow, for that to be the case — I was a wanderer, an interloper in their world. I did not belong here, and the world from which I came was gone. I was but a drifter. Unbeholden to anyone or anything. Why should a reed in a pond feel sorry for someone who had not come to stay?
My thoughts were indicative of a smaller, simpler truth: The situation had changed since I got here. Before, I had thought that the reeds were the ones to be pitied, in cinderblocks and crowded out by the cattails as they were, but they sounded happy, content despite their situation. Now it was I, waiting for noon so I could travel again, who was meant to be pitied?
The reeds paused for breath, then continued. "But then," said the reed, "I have not just impressions. I, the cattails, and the algae – you cannot hear them, but my leaves are close enough in the water to detect their whispers – agree. They saw you coming when I did not, the cattails, and they think your stride is handsome, meant for someone weary from travels but gentle in word. Additionally, I can tell that you came a long way. You have not slept in some time. You are even speaking to the reeds—” the daggers of green in the water bowed like performers in a stage play “—instead of people. This is indicative of selflessness — not necessarily kindness, particularly to yourself, but the action bears merit.”
The reeds exhaled. “Is that enough? or shall I say that you are dead, too, and this puts wary thoughts in my head which were ushered away by the manner of your speech? The algae say that you are rotten, the cattails’ rhizomes agree, and my own roots concur. We can taste the decay you introduced to the water and the air."
But — why were names important, or conversation of interest, to a creature such as this reed? Perhaps it was just being polite.
Or perhaps the reed is just insane, I thought, but then the thought passed and my mind was quiet. I swirled my feet in the still water, breathing slowly, tasting fuel oils and industry fumes on my tongue and in the limp meat of my lungs. It did not hurt to breathe, because I had no need for it, but it hurt to speak, feeling the gritty city air in my throat and mouth and tasting as the wet flesh of my insides dehydrated. A peculiar sensation, that last one — it was like my skin was growing looser by the minute, miniscule amount by infinitesimally small portion as cells collapsed in on themselves to better suffuse my organs with precious water. I was used to dehydration, but only the kind by salt and sea, not by summer. Sheens of sweat were alien to me. But – back to the conversation. My habit of drifting into my thoughts was recognized and open now.
I opened my mouth to speak, not knowing what I would say—
“Hello,” said I to the lake.
“Greetings,” responded the reeds. They twisted in the breeze; my doorway shut behind me with a soft thump, and the air was still once more.
I sat on the docks, my limbs heavy but relaxed. It was a welcome thing that the reeds were still here — I found myself hungering for company. My very bones felt it, in that odd way one feels at times: my very marrow seemed to pull inwards on itself, straining calcium shells from the inside, and as I lay back I could have sworn my lungs were bursting with air of the kind only able to be expelled through the form of words. But as I turned my face to face the reeds, wood scraping my cheekbone, I recalled that these reeds would not remember me. The reeds I remembered would be to these reeds a grandmother, or perhaps great-great-grandmother.
I exhaled, chest swollen with words unsaid, and lay in the sun, letting the silence grow wide. With silence though, in a world not yet weary of living, a symphony fills in the gaps: dangling grey songbirds raised their orchestra from hawthorns, lean waves lapped at the shore of the lake, and the uncommon vwoop,vwoop, vwoop of signalling airships uttered high over clouds. I closed my eyes, skin sticky in the heat. Around me was the music of the world — for this one, at least.
It felt almost like home. In a way, it was.
But I could not mistake it for home. A battered breeze washed over me as I considered. It was not the trees, nor the clouds, nor the smell that anchored me in unfamiliarity. No — I sat up and stared across the pond, realizing at last: it was the Sun. Where was the dark? Shadows were but light dimmed. At daybreak, I expected a coarse and sunless void, and at nightfall, I expected the same. The planets careening off into their own directions and eventual collisions, and no familiar stars or suns or moons to speckle the sky; just a thick, velvety blackness like someone had pulled a sheaf of oilcloth over the thousand glittering eyes of the world. Somehow, in the moment of seeing the sun from the doorway and stepping through, I had glutted myself on memory and let myself forget what a strange thing it was to have a sky.
Perhaps it was not such a strange thing, though. It had only been a few months. Or was it ten years?
The reeds had not spoken since I had greeted them minutes prior, though I sensed their desire for conversation building. I would let them take the first word, I decided. I was not in any hurry.
I dipped my toes in the water, and they came up warm and covered in grime, but warm is what I had been looking for, so I put them back in. The heat suffused me to my bones — I had no realized how cold I was. Looking down at my ankles, I could see a creep of red flush as my skin warmed, revitalized flesh coming alive behind that red wave in a chorus of prickling needles.
Ah, heat. I didn't think I had missed it this badly.
"Enjoying yourself?" The reeds swirled in the water as they spoke, vibrant green in the morning sun. I tilted my head at them, considering slowly while the sun and the lake warmed my bones.
"I suppose," I said quietly. I lay back on the dock, rough wood scraping my pale tender skin, and gazed into the sun without flinching. It did not hurt, but left blue-purple sunspots in my eyes. I played a game with those, flicking my eyes to and fro, trying to draw a picture with the stylus of the great orange star. "I came a long way. I guess I just want to enjoy the sun while it lasts."
"While it lasts?"
"I guess."
I could see much of the docks from where I lay, despite the obscuring fog. Before me, reeds in their oily embrasure: curling up from stacked cinderblocks just scarcely visible beneath the waves. I had to crane my neck to see, but the blocks were not an accident: they sat in a neat pyramid below the waves, and had been kept clean of trash aside from a single plastic pot, overturned and long since empty, crumpled beneath a lower block. Beyond the reeds and the dock: worming rhizomes in sooty sediment. Cattails. They hadn’t yet infiltrated the concrete where the reeds made their home – thick brown tubers, green sword-leaves, and tall green pikes with their sausage-shaped effigies shot up all through the shore, but not here.
I exhaled. The breath was warm in my lungs, yellow with soot and smog. And then, at last, when the reeds did not speak, I finally did.
"What is your name?"
"Our name is immaterial. We are water, and we are a rough set of seeds and pollen turned to worming roots and great green-black air scrubbers. We are the thing that shelters frog eggs in spring, and we are the thing that provides hunting grounds for the waterbugs. We are the thieves of nitrogen of the water lilies who were once planted here, and we are the green things who talk to sleepy students from the local university when they are too tired to think on philosophy any longer." The reeds seemed pleased by their long name, descriptive as it was. Their voice was a smooth rasp like sandpaper on metal, or dry corn husks rubbing together. Like cricket legs rubbing on the very edge of song, their speech was purposeful, direct. "And yourself, if we may ask? What is your name, and how did you come here? You are not local." Their voice was gentle now, unafraid and open.
No, not gentle. Resolute, with an undercurrent of innocent calculation.
I paid it no mind. I wasn't here to fight. "I don't have a name," I said. My voice was not rough, but it was uncomfortable in the air, and not just in the way that one's voice often sounds to oneself. "I'm still coming up with one. Haven't needed one in a while."
It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't a truth. For names, I did not need a new one, necessarily. I had many. Far, far too many. I rolled to my back, then to my other side, trying to get comfortable, and settled for turning the metal of my spine to the reeds as I thought.
Who would I be today? Too many nights spent in faerie-rings and other worlds where names had Meaning had changed me, and I had so many names to give. Would I be Cuts Right Then Down, as I was in the peaks of the Seven Sisters? Or maybe would I be Citrus Blooming, as I was in the deep sea where the red tongues of deep-sea vent dwellers lapped in the boiling dark like waves of blood? Or maybe today my name would be Blistered, Touching Iron Still, as I was in the peaks where the snow tasted of rosehips and lilac blooms.
Perhaps the name of the reed was not too different from mine after all.
But — why were names important, or conversation of interest, to a creature such as this reed? Perhaps it was just being polite.
I opened my mouth to speak, not knowing what I would say—
—but the reeds, bless them, spoke first. I rolled to my side, facing them again out of courtesy, then finally simply sat up. At this angle, the reeds glowed with a soft film of soot and dew. “Why are you here, he-who-has-no-name?” asked the reeds. A patch of anger rose in my chest, but was snuffed out all too quickly by their tone. They were curious, genuinely so. “You have no name, yet today, a necessary stop between your travels, you do not rest, and instead strike up a conversation with a patch of city reeds. Do you do this of your own volition?"
I did not stop to wonder how the reeds knew of my travels. Plants tended to know of these things. it made no difference to me, but for a slight sag in my chest. One like the yoke of loneliness, but not yet hitched to the cart. Their words, though…
The wind was still. The city hummed, and the thwop-thwop-thwop of airships too far above to be heard tingled in my bones, the lake catching the vibrations my ears could not. Closer, but still in the distance, cattails cried out in ecstasy to each other. “You and I,” they cried, “are going to dance under a field of stars! Blow the world to startling white like the dying Sun!” An unnerving statement. They were not talking to me. Indeed, I felt strangely lonesome, albeit lonesome through a shroud of despair at the memory of the dead Sun, as I watched: they wove together in the foggy morning air, blurred just beyond my field of view. They seemed almost as giant stick insects, three meters tall where they intertwined at the periphery of my vision. Dancing endlessly, joyful and free.
Do you remember what freedom was?
I exhaled, and my breath was long, wet, lukewarm. My ribs, brittle and browning, were a vice around my lungs. I examined my hands, bare and ungloved for the first time in weeks, and my skin there was loose, bloated and sagging where pools of bacteria had made their fluidous sacs. Too, my senses were gone, or where they were not gone they were dulled — it was by no small miracle that I could see. My eyes were long gone.
I could not remember how, but I could still see. The surgery had been forever ago. Too many lifetimes ago.
The reeds were saying something, but their words were ones far from what I could hear. Their meaning caught, though, in the thin metal filaments that made up my inner ear: Aren’t you tired of moving?
Was that what they had said, or was that just a fragment of speech from the recesses of my memory? I couldn't tell.
Reeds still murmuring in my ear, I curled up on the warm wood of the dock, snuggled in. A deep orange wave of smog drifted from the city then, blanketing me in suffuse warmth that I would hate to breathe. Lucky that I did not need to. or was it luck, considering the circumstances?
— — EDIT LINE — NOT EDITED FROM HERE ON DOWN — —
“I can come back from this,” I said to the reeds. I didn't know what I meant by that. I let one arm dangle down into the water, soak in the unhealthy heat of the lake — body temperature — and come back up. The filth of the city pond was almost indistinguishable from the now-familiar pattern of tattoos and bruising and scarring that covered the landscape of my skin. "A few more years. A few more years to give up, and then I'll be accepted to University, and I'll get what I had back."
My words were meaningless, a conjecture into the abyss. Reeds, however, are experts in talking to the unknown. Their eyes are fuzzy, ears only to those who can make sound, noses are nonexistent. They are limited only to those with the ability to speak to them, and of those only a few can hear what they say back. When all the world is void, talking to that void becomes something of a specialty.
“You can’t,” they replied. "Going back will not be possible, once you have passed your goal." The reeds’ long leaves waved at me cheerfully, but I sensed there was no joy behind their words. Only one of us knew what was going to be said, in the abyss as we were, and it was not me. So, with nothing else to do, I sat and listened.
Or, tried, I suppose. The reeds asked questions.
“Why are you here?” they asked. They had asked it before, but it held a different meaning now.
I did not let myself think of a clever response. “I'm looking for guidance. Something new that can point me in the right direction." Truths spilled from my maw like blood from a corpse. "I'm not a person who makes good decisions." I looked around. I was in a manmade park entombed in a city of metal, dust, and decay. At my back was a city of fog, at my periphery were great banking swaths of cattails, below me were reeds trapped from birth 'till death in a haphazard pile of cinderblocks, and before me were endless docks, waves, boats, docks, waves, waves, waves.
“In the end, I'm here because my travels brought me here,” said I.
“How did you come to this place?” asked the reeds.
My corpse — my body — was sickly warm. Sweat – or maybe pus, or maybe loose viscera – pooled in my armpits and trickled down my back. A horrid smell assaulted my nose, summoning the image of a swarm of maggot-pregnant flies. My muscles felt weak. “A bubble of black fluid oozed from my mouth.
And then a torrent of words spilled from me. Finally, the bubble in my chest burst, and I spoke.
“That is how my travels often go," I said in a gasp. "I open a door, and I step through. The door shuts, and I'm somewhere new. I drift along until I accomplish a goal, any goal, often the lowest, then I find a new door and go through that too. And the next, and the next, and the next. I mean this both metaphorically and literally — I rarely look at the other options available. I suppose I chose this path because it was not too easy nor too hard.” I smiled, face pressed against the now-cool splintered wood of the dock, and winced as the tug of muscle broke loose a strip of gangrenous flesh from my cheek. The piece of skin that had once belonged to my body slid from beneath my face, sluglike, and plopped into the water, and out from it bled a sickly sheen of oil. “I suppose the fact is that I am chasing something intangible. I only that I hope that I will, eventually, find what I am looking for. If I do not, I suspect I will see myself as in the light of failure for the rest of my life.”
The words that came from my mouth were a torrent, unstoppable until the last drops trickled from the dam that was my mouth. I had not said anything like that to anyone, ever, even the advisors who were financing my project. My travels of millennia. But something in them rang true, and I had to process my own words back in the pause of breath that took place between the last echoes of my voice and the response of the reeds.
The reeds swayed, their movement belying their anxiety. Or perhaps I was projecting – they were reeds, after all, and I was not of this world nor familiar to their situation. They were plants in a freshwater city pond. Who was I to presume their habits, unfamiliar as I was with their customs? But still, the fact was that: the reeds swayed.
At last, they spoke. Their voice was like that of an oracle. “It sounds like you are stuck,” they said. The air holding their words was a soft exhale: was soft, mellow, and clean. It warmed my core like hot cocoa in winter. “You seek something which you cannot define, and this consumes you. Look at yourself!” –and so I did.
Perhaps I had illusioned myself. Perhaps I had simply failed to look down in the past twenty years. I sat up, and now, looking down, all I could see was a disgusting corpse reflecting back at me from the water. Bulging, rotting, sloppy. Not even a shadow of what I assumed I once had been. A shadow of a shadow. Seeking a body, finding none, searching again and again for the thing that would bring me up from the well of decay I found myself in instead of making one of my own. What is this?
It's you. It's always been you.
The reeds spoke quietly over my own silent pronouncements. “You seek something you cannot define. You work toward a goal you cannot describe. You put all your life’s work of meaning and willpower into this, and you will never know if you gained it because there is no threshold for success. You ruin yourself."
I remained silent, staring at my reflection in the rippling water.
“I know you can live forever,” the reeds exhaled quietly. "We know it, us plants. The cattails and algae agree." Their breath brought a cool wave of clean oxygen into the orange smog. In the distance, the shadows of the cattails bobbed. “I know I will die one day, unlike you," said the reed. "Take it from me, from someone who cannot live forever: Just because you have all the time in the world – just because the phrase wasting time has lost its meaning because you have nothing but time on your hands, even through the heat death of the universe because you can just travel elsewhere when that happens – does not mean that you are invulnerable to pain. To strife. To the moment-to-moment wearing-down of your psyche.
“I am just a reed. I think of mud and silt as home. I experience the smog of the city as food. I see air, and I breathe it in. Yesterday, a bullfrog walked across me and its toxins poisoned a cloud of baby water skaters I had nestled in my leaves, and I cried.” The reeds wilted faintly at the memory. “I think you have forgotten how to do that, my immortal friend."
They're right, you know.
"You have forgotten that despite your immortality, you are still human enough to desire change," the reeds continued. "You have forgotten that living is experiencing life moment-by-moment, not just setting a goal and waiting until it arrives. You treat your body as a vessel to your next destination in time and space, and forget that the joy in life – even one as long as yours – is not found in the destination, but the journey, to pick a phrase.
“I asked you when you came here why you were here, and what your name was, and you said that you did not know. Or no, you said that you didnt need one anymore. All living things should have names. I have a name, and I am just a reed.” The reed paused, the long speech hanging winded it. I waited patiently, looking around as it caught its breath.
The pond was not pretty, but it was one I would not forget. Not just for the well-spoken reeds, nor the rambunctious cattails. There was something magical about the vast expanse of city water all put together for the purpose of a manmade lake.
Because that’s what this was: a lake. A lake pretending to be the sea. I had called it a pond, but in reality it was a vast spread of mustard yellow and bark brown water, peppered with docks and barges and peapod-shaped boats and canoes all through its innards. The sky above was wet, murky like diluted milk, and blended seamlessly with the fog at the edge of the water. There were no lilies, but there was algae and there were water-plants hanging like upside-down gooey teardrops from the silt at the bottom of the murk, fernlike. I could not see to the other shore, thanks to the fog, and because of that it felt like the lake could stretch for miles unimpeded, like when one stands at the edge of an endless ocean.
TO DO: PUT LICENSE HERE
I was alone in a white abyss, save for the reeds and the cattails. And the docks on which I sat, and the cinderblock bricks from which strange and intelligent things grew despite the difficulty. Despite the loneliness. Despite everything.
The reeds finally caught their breath. They seemed to sense my continuation of their argument in their mind, and so supplicated their remaining words and arguments with only a few:
“You need to let go,” they said. Their voice was sweet as a spring breeze. “It is good to have a goal, but your goal is not your only objective in life. Immortality does not grant you invulnerability. Life is not just one goal, but many, overlapping and strung along a path. You came to this world, you said, for something new. For direction. I think you felt lost, too, and needed something to break the chain of cycles you found yourself in, where you paced in circles with no end goal in sight save for the words you held in your chest.
"I think immortality has deadened you to recognition of your own suffering, but you are still affected by it, like a surgery patient under anaesthesia. You still feel the effects of the blood loss, even if you can’t pinpoint the wound.
"I don't think immortality is healthy for you, friend. You can't just go drifting anymore. Maybe it's different for you immortal people, but to me, it seems like all it is is an awfully good way to waste time and get set in behaviours that aren't healthy."
Some part of me had needed to hear those words, I think, because something in my mind broke. A quiet acceptance, of what I didn’t yet know. I lodged the words and actions I would next need to take in the back of my mind, shelving them and setting them on a mental timer, for I was not about to break down before a bunch of reeds in a city lake, and rose from the dock, a weight I did not know had existed already easing itself from my back. My chest felt looser, my lungs and mind clearer than they had been in days. My legs were tarred from the wet paint coating the wood, but this time I did not spit and turn my gaze, for the mottling was beautiful, in its own way, my skin indented with finger-thick splinters and blushing purple bedsores only possible because of the decay of my body. A decay I did not mind so much anymore, I found, because in that moment I decided my next destination would be one to repair myself. Immortality aside, my goal could wait. I had all the time in the world, and then the world after that, and the world after that.
Chest light and heart warmer than I had felt in years, I turned to walk from the pond, but before I could go, something caught my mind.
“One moment,” I said, turning back to the reeds.
They waited patiently for my inquiry.
“Why are you here, in a pond in which you cannot thrive?” I gestured to the cinderblocks, through whose holes the reeds wound their darting green leaves. “The pond in which you live is nigh-anaerobic, the city foul, the water something that kills. You spoke to me of the ways to leave, of making a better life for myself. Why do you not do the same?”
The reeds laughed, a quiet singing like that of a cricket singing. Familiar, and I understood why – I had heard it when I first ventured to the pond, dusty and tired from my travels and from so, so much more that I had not at the time known the weight of. “I am rooted,” explained the reeds, “unlike you. I grew here because it was difficult, and to prove myself capable of this.”
The reeds gestured toward the cattails, who were busy rowdily catcalling to a distant egret. “They respect me, despite appearances. I suppose I have grown fond of them. You are immortal – I don’t think you would know how it feels to be tied to a place.
“I grew here when an apartment tenant bought me from a plant sale, rooted me in hard stale tapwater, found that I was suffering without light and without nutrients, and when I looked dead, tossed me out the window. I was lucky to land on the road, where a caring elderly couple took me from the plastic pot which I had not been removed since I was bought, and placed me gently in the water."
The reeds swayed at the memory. “The rest is familiarity and comfort, I suppose,” they finished. “I like this place, despite the shouting of the cattails and the occasional swimming of dogs and the toxins of bullfrogs. It is peaceful, especially in the seasons where the oil runoff isn’t so bad – you caught me at a bad time, I’m afraid – and the academics from the nearby college sometimes take the time to practice their plays and philosophies here, where I can listen though they do not know I exist. That’s why I can speak, I suppose, though I still do not know how you can hear me.”
“Some mysteries are better left unsolved,” said I with a soft smile.
“Indeed,” said the reeds with a bow.
We shared a quiet, tranquil moment. The sun was still low on the horizon, the daylight of this world long and beautiful in coming despite the smog. Despite the city. Despite the restless reeds, invasive bullfrogs, raucous cattails. Despite everything, the world was beautiful, and it had been far too long since I had seen the beauty as it was, and not through the sniper’s scope of narrow vision my goal had made the world into.
“I don’t want to leave,” I said. It wasn’t true.
“You must,” said the reeds. “I will remember you, while I still live, and I will tell my descendants of you so that when you one day return we can call you by name.”
It should not have meant anything to me. In fifty years, my existence would be forgotten by even the most long-lived of the cattails’ children, and my footsteps long since washed from the path of concrete and gravel that led to the docks of the lake. Too, I would forget someday, even if it took me five hundred years, the words of the reeds. Today would be like a chalk-mark on a river stone: not even needing erosion, simply washed away by the ceaseless stream of memory and time. But somehow, basking in the glory of the sunrise, the reed’s words meant the world to me, and they felt more immortal than I ever had been.
“Thank you,” I said. A small tear dripped down my eye. “I will remember you too.”
∴
The day went on, and the reed flourished in the oil and the muck, and a traveller went though a door that should have gone nowhere at all and came out the other side in another world entirely. The city of dust continued on, and eventually, the sun went down.
When the stars came out, they too were beautiful, and the reeds dreamed of other galaxies.
Grey
Sadness fades like sea foam in the sun, they say
but no, that’s not quite right.
Sadness is
the drone of a heavy song played on loop
the weight of a bowling ball in your chest
the curved stiffness of your spine.
Sadness is
exhaustion in combing your hair
a raw sob that comes out as a yawn
a restlessness without the energy to move.
Sadness is
a drowning
a suffocating
a restless sleep without dreams.
Sadness is in all of us, they say
but no, that’s not quite right.
Sadness, for them, is
the burning of tears on one’s cheeks
the tremors of memories in one’s hands
the straightjacket ache of leaden marrow in one’s ribs.
Sadness, for them, is not
a slow grief that lingers
with mussels and oysters falling tasteless on the tongue
of listless boredom like static in dry wool.
Sadness, for them, is
temporary
changeable
gone with their tears.
This sadness is a slow, mindless thing,
and I would not wish for those outside to know its face.
The Sleeping of the Esteemed Prince
The sky clears; sermon falls. Bloody-stooled dawn sears from hunted white and water breaks.
The sun has fallen, cremated in cooling hearth. Will we begin again?
Fall not to temptation lest hyacinth morn be wash'd from jade to ash. Sunset writhes in fetid rot.
Together we march, solidarity hiding, trembling, curled deep inside our hearts. Are we one once again? You say my name, but there is nothing left to hear.
Glass strikes ruddy earth, scars soil down to marble, teardrops in dawn's horrid light. This earth cracks, shatters in drooling anticipation of Spring. It is lucky; the winter was long, but not long enough to kill. Our sky and ground are the same, for now, but the sun will return.
I miss you. Where have you gone?
Seedlings bolus, burst from bitter ground, wither and die. The soil is not ripe: the frost is still here, spiderwebbing what little life remains. The air is warm in this lifeless spring, staticky and unfeeling, and a mockery of what lies plaintively below.
Weary shadows. A clock ticks — light passes, hits skin. That, too, is shade. Where have we gone? What of our spirit, our love?
No love exists without competition. The former was once the latter, and the latter once the former, but our leaves are emboldened, reddened by the taste of combat. Even evergreen is choked by mistletoe.
What of our past?
Mighty talent likens to heavy machinery: bitter, unloved, a tool for endless drudgery. No bricks stir in snowmelt: all have seeped to clay and footprints wash from the moon. The colours of our eyes blend to seamless grey in hazy morning.
Where is my face? I left it here, somewhere. Where did it go?
Earth exhales, settles. What pervasive grief, where bones lie in the moonlight. Eyes do not see, feet step and crack that blood frozen below, and do not feel what hearts lie clutched in feeble remains, too weak to move, too young to die. Our sun is gone; only ashfall persists, and it is known: dawn will come with stranger stars.
Hearts are held close, yes, but not all who listen wish to hear. What will we be when we are let go?
Flesh goes but minds remain, rot in fetid echoes of former cacophony. In solemn, cautious quiet, dawn creeps out.
We open our eyes, and in solitude, we are reborn.
Baba
There was once a small white animal that looked like a squirrel, or maybe a particularly runty dog. Its name was Baba.
Baba wandered the streets of New London. His claws were long and dull, scratching and clicking on the pavement as he walked. His stomach cramped with hunger and a grey buzzing haze filled his mind – the tickling petals of starvation brushing up against his consciousness. Baba walked slowly, rhythmically, with a gait that spoke of too many days without food and a parched mouth craving water.
A striped walking path across a road beeped and two hundred feet thundered like an avalanche toward Baba. He meekly pressed against a wall, waited for them to pass. Continued moving. If he did not eat, he would die.
This city was not meant for animals.
Baba had come to the city when he was but a small kit. He and his family had come from the forest, past the spongey pine needles and into the flat, hot concrete panels of the city. It was a visit, one of many stops on a walk, but something called out to him that day.
The day had been long, and Baba had wanted to stretch his legs anyway – the calling was not the only reason he left, but it was the reason he did not go back. Baba slid off his mother.
Baba’s mother ambled along, did not notice the absence of one of her many sons, and Baba did not get to see the other locations his mother had in mind. The lights and smells enticed him; the sights lured him from his mother’s watchful eye. He spared no thought for his family, could barely remember them beyond half-seen faces fuzzy with fur, and it was for this carelessness that Baba never did solidify the faces of his siblings.
On that day, Baba found himself far from his family, wandering the city. A plaza, specifically. His fur had been soft then, groomed by his mother that morning, and the lights of the city dazzled him in their brilliant flashing hues. People fed him, then, cooed over his smallness, his delicate whiskers, and that day, Baba’s fur turned wet and crusty from devoured pastries.
The day grew long. As Baba travelled deeper into the city, plump with fatty foods and confident that only a few minutes had passed since he had left his family, Baba had a thought. It was one taught by the forest, embedded into his brain over years of evolution: that the greatest sign of strength is having the privilege of broadcasting your face and name over your territory. Animals that hide do so because they are vulnerable; animals like monarchs and poisonous frogs do so because they can afford to display their worth and danger. It was for this that Baba thought the city to be strong, and Baba thought that he was cunning for having infiltrated it so successfully, for the shouting of its location must be because it was full of worth. And Baba, a small white-haired animal, thought that he would grow strong and healthy from whatever was in the city that needed such loud proclamation of its existence.
For this, Baba was very, very wrong.
He did not see his mother again and, weeks later when he finally found the streets they had walked together, Baba could not find her scent. He mewled that night, cried and whimpered in the long starless dark that came after their separation, but nobody came to help him.
Baba never found the forest again.
Baba was tough, but he did not want to be. As his kit-fur shed and was replaced with wiry bristles – all the better for squirming on soft pine needles, narrowly twisting from a predator’s teeth – and as he grew less cute, the food stopped coming. And when hands descended from above, they did not hold food, but grabbing fingers and nets.
Baba always got away, but the nights grew longer. Baba was hungry, now, hungrier than he had been for a long time. baba found himself eating fewer grasses and more meats – rats, old browning cuts thrown out by the butcher. And as the nights grew long, Baba’s teeth fell out and were replaced by sharp canines and sharper molars.
And as Baba grew, the feet that walked the city, came with those small hands that once gave him food – those grew too. And as the feet grew larger, the feet grew stronger. And those feet started kicking.
It was in those strange days with equal length of day and night that Baba learned what it meant to be hungry. His old shelter he had had as a kit was gone, the box rotted to flat leather pads like the stack it had sat balanced upon. The brilliant glowing lights and blaring sounds of the city that once enticed him now felt stifling and brash in his chest. Baba would often look up to the sky on the ever-lengthening nights – he could not afford to sleep away the day, he needed to look for food – and would find that there were no stars. He could barely remember what they looked like.
What am I doing here?
It was a question that permeated his life those days, and as the leaves turned orange and rotted in the breeze Baba considered the answer. His mind was still adapted to the forest, and as the city became his home, treacherous and grey though it was, washed flat by torrential downpours and always short on food – a prosperous but starving place, hungry in a way that did not mean want for satiety – Baba pondered.
And all the while, Baba hunted for anything he could fit in his jaws.
There are certain things embedded in one’s mind, and despite the dullness of his memories, Baba knew: in the forest, there are not many lights or colours. Everything is muted, dim, unless you know when and how to look: there are no blaring yellow signs to the river, but water goes down and the brook can be heard babbling on the breeze. One never knows if an owl is truly nesting in a tree until they are eaten, but snuffling about in the leaf litter and finding bony pellets and feathers gives one a good idea. Each sound, each scent, every rustling of the branches in the trees had a meaning. In this way, the forest was full.
And as Baba stalked a rat in a pile of old bricks – he was getting better at that, now, for he found these days that he, more often than not, had to hunt to survive – he looked up at the empty concrete-steel buildings with their pretty lights and sounds and realized that they meant nothing at all. The rat scurried over his paws and escaped, and he paid it no mind, for he was enraptured. Glowing billboards hollered advertisements over videos and bouncing music that careened down the street and each held messages, just like the babbling of the brook and the pellets in the litter, but the lights and sounds of the city were hungry. Empty. Starving, but for attention, not food. Baba, too, was starving, the streets were cold – the heating in the sidewalks was faulty, now, and either searing or freezing – and the upright-walking animals that inhabited the city were dreary and grey. Grey, because they never strayed from their routines, and because of their worn pelts.
Some of the grey animals that infested the city worked like clockwork, these days, so much so that Baba could use their movements to know when the shops would close and throw out their old food. And every day, Baba wondered why the clockwork animals did not try to escape.
The city was empty under the guise of being full. It was finally then, looking up at a city so bright it had scared away the stars and with glowing neon signs singing a tinnitus-wail to his flattened ears, that Baba realized he had been tricked. With an empty belly and rain trickling down from the rooftops, soaking his fur, Baba knew that the city was not the forest he had thought it to be. The city was no forest, and just because the lights and sounds were bold did not mean that the city was a world of plenty. And Baba wanted to go home.
But that was no longer possible.
Change is heralded by the small things. A phone call from an unknown number, a package at the doorstep, a strange lump in the flesh of one’s breast. Baba knew of none of these things, but he knew the principle: change comes at once. Sadly, though, change is insurmountable – when it comes, it comes, and knowing its patterns does not stop it from happening.
The winter was first heralded by longer nights. Baba noticed this – he barely slept now, shivered himself awake when he did, his scrawny body not able to spare the energy of keeping him warm while he slept. This would not have killed Baba. However, the winter did not come alone. It was not the torrential flooding rains, nor the sudden absence of dumpster food where the old butcher had closed shop, nor the terrible cold that forced the touristy sections of the city to lose the luster and warmth in their pristine hot-tile sidewalks.
This is the truth about change: it comes in dribbles. Like the breaking of a dam, change is not the torrent, nor is it the aftermath, nor is it the flood itself. Change is the trickles of water through the cracks, the groaning of reinforced steel beams, and the looking-away of the people responsible for safety checks. Change is money poorly spent and pocketed where it should be put toward repairs, and the flood and all that comes with it are but the results.
In essence, the worst part of a disaster is not the disaster itself, but its components. And for Baba, the worst part was not the cold, but the kicking.
People, Baba discovered, were truly hateful of his presence now. With the dumpsters locked and the street cleaners sweeping trash daily, he had little chance of scavenging, and so he turned to tandem hunting and begging. This, above everything else, was how Baba learned the true meaning of senseless violence.
It started slow, as all things do, but it escalated quickly. Sometimes, people would kick at his legs, and he would run and stumble away on bruising flesh. Sometimes, the kicking feet went for his belly. Sometimes, they went for his ribs, for his head, for his brittle paws, and he would wake up in a trash pile, tossed aside like an old toy, squinting feebly up at the sun’s reflection on metal and glass towers. He wondered, those days, if the pain tucked in his brittle ribs would go away long enough that he could keep going.
That was a frequent wonder of his, and as the cold grew long, he wondered it almost incessantly.
But each time when he was kicked, beaten into submission, and thrown into a pile of trash and soggy cardboard cracked with half-melted ice, Baba found a way to pick himself up, pained and tender, to keep walking. Each time, Baba would find food and shelter before the night came and the rain – it was a nightly occurrence now – poured from the sky, flooded the streets like a tidal wave, washed the city clean.
Every night, Baba found just enough to keep going.
Winter gave Baba short scruffy fur that grew like rotting rice in a bombed plantation, patchy and limp. Baba was scrawny, brittle as an old bone, and one morning, he had woken up with one leg bent the wrong way and it never went back to normal, giving him a dragging stagger that made his paws bleed with brownish blood if he moved too quickly. If Baba were thrown under a truck and scraped off the road, he would look no different save for the red in his fur.
It was over a month into winter when Baba, listless with hunger and cold, found the archway. It was a long grey day, filled with high winds and pelting rain that forced even the competing city crows and delivery drones to weather the storm together in their cement hideaways. Baba struggled faintly along the sidewalk, hugging the anti-homeless spikes that dragged in his ragged fur, enduring their cold metal presence against his numb skin lest he be swept away like so many piles of leaves. Police sirens rang in the distance like church bells, and through the cold, metallic rain, Baba smelled food. It smelled soft and bready, meaty and hot, and he wanted it more than anything. Baba had not eaten in many, many days. Baba's body was soft, pliable, and bleeding, and he was willing to drag his broken self into the storm to get it.
But Baba was weaker than he realized. The wind howled down the city streets, driving even the kicking feet and their legs away to warm by tamed fires. But Baba had no such luxury, and his stomach was so, so empty, and so Baba found himself dragging his claws into the concrete, holding down against the raging wind even as his skin was ground down against the concrete until it was raw and painful, and Baba walked headfirst into the howling gale, heedless of how it pulled at his loose skin and fur like a riptide. Baba needed food. He wouldn’t live to see tomorrow if he did not eat, he knew, and he crawled forward on his withered belly with his fur dragging against the freezing metal and concrete and
Baba missed a step
and stumbled.
Baba dropped his claws into the cement as though it were the wood of a tree and bounced off because it was not wood, he had left the forest for real now, and he knew that he had lost, that he would be bashed into the anti-homeless spikes and dashed against reinforced anti-sniper shop windows and be a red splatter against the steaming electro-heated pavement. The smear that was Baba would get swept away, if not by the rain, then by the street cleaners when they made their twice-daily rounds to clean up all the bus-hit pigeons and starving flightless crows, and Baba's corpse would be unrecognizable among all the remnants of the broken wishes and dreams that fell to the street, dead from servitude that reigned so thick that it was like a choking smog.
Baba stumbled
and the wind did not pull him back.
Baba’s claws and muscles were tense still, and in the dead air Baba launched himself forward, the pressing force of the wind gone, flew through the frozen gale and fell forward onto the pavement, slid on his face, rolled to a stunned, gravelly halt on his side.
Baba breathed a staggering breath and his vision blackened at the edges.
He could still smell the food, a sandwich, and it was stronger now, coming closer, filling his nostrils like a tangible force, and so close he could almost taste it. Baba shuddered against the pavement, a seizure-like movement, aching belly a shrivelled raisin in his chest, and found that standing was too much effort. His claws clutched at the pavement mechanically, harshly, and his soaked fur – what little there was left – lay clumped in matted knots against his skin.
Baba lay there on the pavement, eyes drifting shut, and felt wriggling fleas burrow their way from his cooling body to seek new hosts. Maybe rats. Maybe birds. Anything was better than him, and if the fleas knew it, then he did too. He was dying.
And it was then that Baba’s heart, in that slow, timeless moment, stopped beating.
And Baba finally closed his eyes to relax into death.
The street was still, as was the wind, and silent. It was several minutes before Baba opened an eye. It was a sign of his condition that his soft, tepid heart did not seize: he found himself staring into a blurry face silhouetted against a sky that glittered with frozen raindrops stilled through mechanisms he could never hope to understand.
Baba’s organs were but lumps in his chest, and he did not move. There were feet in front of him now.
Baba expected the feet to kick. He, a dead animal still moving, cowered as best he could while lying on his side, curling wetly like a salted slug on the dirty city street. He did this, trying his best to save his tender ribs and empty belly from the worst of the assault that he knew to come, and waited. And when soft, warm, rune-tattooed hands lifted him up to rest against a hot gentle chest, he whimpered and squeezed his eyes shut.
Movement, a flash of red, a whispered word, and a searing pain like a backward-serrated knife through Baba’s chest. Baba could not feel, had lost that sense in the rain and wind and months of slow starvation, but Baba felt it there, real as the frozen raindrops that glittered like tiny stars through his closed eyes. And Baba felt movement beneath him, around him, in the unfamiliar sensation of the person who was holding him walking, and heard rather than saw the shimmerng droplets of time-stopped rain hitting his fur.
And Baba, a short, scrawny city squirrel held in the arms of someone whose name meant Means to an End, quietly faded and died.
But no, that didn’t happen.
Baba learned all about it later, felt the effects of his bleeding-fresh operations and thaumaturgic implants after it was all said and done. Baba learned of his apologetic saviour – a lost Library patron in need of a ritual animal to open a Way home – even later than that. But Baba didn’t care because Baba was alive.
Baba scrabbled in the air, found a wall, oriented, and launched upward, sailing to the next shelf and feeling none of the gravity that held most everyone else. Baba skimmed the titles of the books as he flew past them. – Fear and Loathing, And I was Present at the Death of a God, Unavoidable Split – and felt a seeping heat in the base of his skull as a metal unit engraved with AR-PFC-0004 warmed to activation. Nuts were plentiful here, growing from the branches of living shelves and the occasional wood-skinned Docent, and snacks easy to come by – patrons fed him often, fondness growing as they saw him soaring across the shelves with neither wing nor technology, and he, too, took a liking to drifting above and between the ever-present crowds.
He still avoided the floor. Once, when he was still learning how to jump from shelf to shelf with grace (and still twisting and contorting in a reflexive reaction to freefall), he did land on the ground, set his claws deep in the soft wood, and found himself back in the hard concrete streets of the grey city, rain and wind buffeting his soft fur and horrid wet streets filled with kicking feet moving fast to hurt and stomp and betray –
And he leaped into the air, scrabbled up high and hid in a corner of a shelf. And his heart raced, but his new body did not hurt. That was a long time ago now, and Baba did not land on the floor anymore, a high banister as close as he trusted himself to get to the patrons.
But through it all, Baba’s heart was light, despite his memories, and he was a good squirrel now, one gifted with a mind that thought beyond the next day’s food and a magic imbued in his body as a gift from the one who had brought him here that he may never – never – have to touch the floor again. And when Baba gently drifted to a high shelf near the artificial sunlight ceiling, crawled between a last will and testament and a dense, hard-bound chronicle of someone called Ulak the Drifter – and landed in a sweet-smelling cloth nest shaded by the fruit-laden boughs of skytrees, Baba finally settled down.
Sunlight drifted down from the artificial sky above, warm and rainless, and Baba’s nest glittered with trinkets, jewelry, and soft gifted toys. And in that moment, Baba knew that he was happy.
And though he was far from the forest, Baba knew that he was finally home.
Yes, I named this sorry creature after the animal in Baba is You. It was meant to be temporary, I swear.
Din author page
Rules for addition:
1. No editing of other people's paragraphs without their consent
2. No more than ten paragraphs per person without permission
3. Only one person works on their part at a time (this is to help keep people from stepping on each other's lines)
Put your name below when you have finished your part:
- Stygian Blue
- Jacky
- Destinysday
It was a dark and stormy night, and Din was sleepy. He yawned, stretching out on the bed, a muzzy warm feeling of heat and exhaustion resting in his leaden chest. It was the perfect night to rest: long, dark, constellations of stars glittering like crystalline frosting in the clouds passed by his window in long, thin trails, a wind uttered a low roar like the rumblings of a tiger outside, and a light patter of raindrops drummed a beat on the ceramic-tile roof. So tired. And yet he could not sleep.
Din rolled over and gazed vacantly into the abyss outside. Black-tipped tree branches scratched at the window, long, scraggly April blooms smearing pink and white on the old glass panes – those old warped panes installed a good hundred years ago that let in more draft than sunlight in the day, but somehow, inexplicably, shone with brilliant starlight like great panels of phosphorescent flame come night.
The scratching of branches drilled into Din’s ears like the squealing whine of an off-tune violin, sharp and screaming, filling his small room with a sensation like biting teeth. Din shut his eyes, squeezed them shut. He was too present, too manifest at this time, to fall asleep. A restless energy buzzed in him like a horde of maggot-pregnant flies, wicked and nauseating and unassailable in its magnitude.
Suddenly, a knock at the door. He sat up and barely had time to register as the door flew open. The Gang™️ from the Wanderer's Library burst through! Before he could react they grabbed his computer and quickly started executing their master plan. Din didn't have an author page and by golly were they going to make one or die trying. Their plan was to split up and take turns writing while Din searched for one of them only to find they didn't have it anymore.
Destiny was quickly handed the computer and ran off toward the kitchen. If this page was ever going to get completed The Gang™️ would need some snacks to keep their energy up. Preparing some tacos with cheese( the only correct way to eat a taco) he took a quick glance through some of the files. There were a lot of stories, yet no way to properly organize and read through them. FOR SHAME DIN. With a few quick keystrokes the author page was one step closer to being completed.
There is music coming from tinny speakers. It is like wind chimes, high and slow, and rings in yellow and gold through the air, sometimes backed by serrated shades of brown and ochre, rising like the crest of a wave in a polluted sea. The lights – I can hear them, too, a tinnitus-whine buzzing above my head, and the floor, oh, the floor, is disgusting but complementary to the room.
Ah, the room. The walls are tacky, look sticky, as though an elementary school’s worth of children went and dragged their snotty, grubby fingers across the walls. I cannot see the streaks, but I know that they are there. On the walls, above and covering the surely-there streaks of unclean hands, are hand-drawn posters, some describing directions on campus, some describing diagrams which, I presume, we will use in the course. All irrelevant, of course – this information and more can be found online with ease. They say in law school that the role of lawyers is to become the most fungible thing there is to be. I disagree – these posters are what it means to be fungible. To describe what is already known, to express what can be found better, brighter, stronger, elsewhere.
This room, overall, is cramped. That is what it is. Cramped in a sense of being, in a sense of feeling, in an emotional, spiritual sense: the ceiling is too low, the floor is too wide, the walls are too narrow, and the windows – open as they are, letting in breeze and birdsong from outside – feel shut, compressed, coming in and pressing on my eyes whenever I become aware of their presence. Too, the blinds – old-style sunblocks half-shading the windows in jarring, jagged edges, like a serrated knife filed, sharpened poorly, by an amateur knife-sharpener – shock me in their garish, vulnerable existence, and I find myself drawn away from the windows, away from the outdoors, to compress and despise what I once loved in fear of that thing which would save me in my newfound state. The blinds are a pinnacle of engineering and fortitude, and for the likes of them, I cannot express my degree of hate.
Now, myself. My back hurts, has been hurting since last week, and my eyes, too, ache, ache in a way that I have come to associate with too much unfiltered sunlight. My stomach squeezes in on itself – my breakfast, a flat, lukewarm protein shake that will taste like chalk when it comes time to pour it down my narrow gulping throat – sits uneaten in the pocket of my backpack. I want it, have been wanting it since I woke up, but I know that I cannot, in fact, have it, and so I set myself, steel myself, to another hour of hunger in this frail, starving body.