“It was strange to be seen as a woman again. I had not been female in at least nine years. Nothing of my biology had changed—other than a slight tinkering with hormones. Rather, it was that I had given it up with all the rest. Aspirants surrendered everything: property, identity, gender. We were told to bring nothing, but of course many did. I remember the cries and scuffles, magnified in echo, as we shuffled silently in single file through the brackets under the Terminium. Hands found their way into our pockets, under our arms, between our legs. Fingers probed our mouths and anuses, removing not just contraband but fillings that might be melted for cash. Those who held some last vestige of life—a locket or note from a loved one—would grasp at it as it was removed, only to be struck remorselessly by an adult bearing a staff. We were gathered, and the hair on the tops of our heads was shaved and that on the sides cut short such that we looked like a collection of middle-aged dentists. We were taught to bind our bodies with the oeutra, the white wrapping, over which we were robed in brown. We bore no insignia, no mark of status or rank. We were given new designations and told to sleep on the floor in a great room with no furniture, where we had only each other for warmth.
“I remember a feeling of disorientation some weeks in. I was reciting the Prenacles of Ord with the others when I sneezed. I had not sneezed since before my admission, or if I had, I didn’t remember it, and that simple act triggered a memory of my mother wiping my nose. From there, I remembered the rest: the earthy smell of our house, sunsets over the pond, the feel of my feet as they slid under the canvas blanket, both prickly and inviting, that covered my bed. I began to cry and was quickly removed and beaten, not in punishment, but so that my tears would become those of pain rather than loss, and the association would be broken.
“Even in those early days, rarely did I think of myself as a girl. Yes, we all had our secret guesses. Which of the others was a boy? Who was Almatian and who from Demeria? No one ever revealed their doubts and suggestions to me, but I could see it in their eyes, as I’m sure they could see it in mine. If we made friends, we would wake up to find them removed to another sabbot—or we would be removed ourselves, as I was in my second year. That was the most difficult. My first seasons had almost seemed a game. It was painful, yes, but also exciting. Everything was new, like a puzzle to be figured out. But that was not the case the second time around. By then, I knew what to expect, and I never felt the privations of our order as distinctly or as deeply as at first vespers that year. I thought about quitting many times. Others did as well. Doubt amplifies doubt, and for each cry of frustration, for each failure of our peers to achieve a miracle, our own doubts grew.
“The last time I was female was at the end of that second year, when we were allowed to see our families one last time. We were told it was—Well, honestly, I don’t remember what we were told. The truth was, it was a test. Those who found it too difficult to return were expelled, as were those who found it too easy. Ours was not a refuge, a place to hide from terror or abuse. Those who did not waver, who left nothing behind, found the doors of the Terminium locked at their return. Our calling required both sacrifice and the strength to make it. Those who had not both were turned away. I do not know what happened to them, or where they went, but many of them remain very dear to me.
“By the start of our third year, and for the next nine, I was neither girl nor woman. I was an aspirant, and whatever doubts I had were extinguished the first time I moved an object with my mind. I had failed in my task many times and was taken and locked in a room without food or water. I thought it was hunger that would get me, for it was only hunger that I had known. But there is no demon like thirst. Every parched cell of my body, shriveling in want, called out to the glass just beyond my reach.
“On the third day, it moved.
“By the time of my ascension, the odd realization of my body’s structure—while sitting on the toilet or suffering the odd cycle that broke free—felt as alien to me as any language I didn’t understand. My body was a prison, nothing more. I could’ve just as easily been born a boy as not. All of it, right down to the plumbing, was as incidental to my being as the shape of my ears. I was a Mysterian, and I could not be broken.
“Crouching half naked in the jail, seeing the look of surprise—even disgust—on the soldier’s faces, I felt that which I had not in so long. To them, I was my body. All that I had achieved, all that I had sacrificed in the achieving, mattered less than the air we all breathed, and I pulled my robes around me in spite of myself.”
Last fall, I introduced you all to Oth. At the time, I mentioned I had been living with it for something like 25 years, it having first come to me in college.
From just before dawn until the muezzin's midday call, the castaways from a thousand cultures shuffled about the market, sliding shoulder-to-shoulder past each other without fear: the prim-cut brandy-sellers; the flickering votives; the ramshackle meat merchants and their curious fur circus; the Tellurian Moks; the skampering shandle fairies; the red-clad Regarda staring warily at the Kuoden mountainriders and their three-meter bushieks; and underneath it all, the urchins and beggars, their arms held limply in half-hearted entreat. All of them haggled and spat, prayed and cursed, flourished and faded under the twin gazes of the noon-blue sun and the azure-black spires of the Atishan Birzkirk, which towered overhead.
Oth was a crater. Six weeks by night ship from the next Imperilum garrison, it was the furthest from anywhere one could be and still be part of the Strand. To its masters, it was part wound, part jewel: too far to be of use, too hard-won to be abandoned.
Like deep-sea drillers who live under compression for months at a time, the engineers of Planetary Repair work in extreme conditions and while on the job, must don special compression suits to visit the surface, lest they be torn to shreds by the bends. Water and liquid nourishment can be ingested via a compression chamber in the mouth, and urine similarly collected, but otherwise the engineers under compression must return to the planetary depths to eat or defecate.
Of all possible assignments with the company, Oth is considered by far the worst. Whether because of its remote location, the ineptitude of its administration, or corporate corruption, Planetary Repair in Oth is perpetually underfunded, and engineers aren't so much repairing the planet as slowly staving off the inevitable. As such, Oth tends to receive the company’s worst engineers, and they tend to stay for life.
This time around, I have more passages, which are coming with increasing frequency, not unlike labor pains, I suppose. I also want to share some of the art that has inspired me or else been close to something I came up with myself. All of it is credited, none of it is mine, and if the owners would like me to take it down, they only have to ask.
For those who would like to read the first collection of passages, you can do so here:
There were innumerable faiths across the known universes, but there was only one. Sometimes referred to as The Holy Seed, in reference to its first place among others, it had no official title. It was simply The Church. By law, anyone who lived within cannon shot of the Imperilum Navy was supposed to acknowledge doctrinal adherence. Other faiths, such as were recognized, were tolerated on the basis of a three-point theological treatise called the Pandemos, which started with the observation that God had created a multitudinous universe. That fact may seem impossible to deny, but faiths make worlds, not the other way round, and for the several centuries prior to the Pandemol Synod, during which time a lengthy and brutal religious persecution engaged much of known space, it was argued by the Prelates of The Church that the true universe had only one form. All others were derivative. Like reflections in a distorted mirror, they argued, such universes did not exist in and of themselves but were dependent on the true universe. This despite ample evidence to the contrary, not least that you could get out and walk around in them. This did not bother the Prelates, who, despite having never left The Garden of the Holy Seed, filled reams with arcane proofs of a single universe, which was also their universe. Chief among these was the Apostolic Principle, which said that the reason we knew there was only one universe was because God had said so.
It was revolutionary then for the Pandemol Synod to settle on a belief that, not weeks before, would’ve garnered an inquisition. God was not wrong, they said. It was merely that what He had meant by universe and what the early Church had meant were not the same. And who could blame them really, given how little was known at the time? Some brave souls pointed out that the reaction to the discovery of multiple universes might not have gone the way it did, especially given that we’d gone through it once already with the heliocentric theory, but those people were not Prelates, and anyway many of them were in jail, and no one has faith in criminals.
But although the Pandemol Synod recognized a multitudinous universe, its second point affirmed that The Church was the only church in it. All others, it said, were like reflections in a distorted mirror. (Why change what had worked for centuries?) What was necessary, then, for any other faith to be tolerated was an official exposition of how its principles “reified and danced” with the overarching principles of The Church, which represented everything that was true and therefore could be believed. Other faiths were understood to be mere fragments of that higher truth. It was the duty of the faithful, the Synod argued, to treat these others not as heretics but as parents might treat wayward children, shepherding them patiently but insistently ever closer to the fold.
The truth, of course, was more complicated. Many faiths produced no such exposition. Others did but claimed the reverse. Still others had expositions produced for them which were then burned in protest. But that did not stop every First Prelate from inviting the heads of various faiths to photo opportunities at The Garden of the Holy Seed, there to claim the Great Ordination an ongoing success. The practical understanding was that anyone could believe whatever they wanted to believe, provided they didn’t make a big deal of it or otherwise call attention to themselves, especially by contradicting The Church.
There, one faith made a name for itself above all others. If there was ever a church to which one could definitively not belong, it was The Church of the Seven Suns.
Despite its name, the Seven Suns was only nominally a church at all. It had no priests, no hierarchy, no sermons, no holy texts, and barely any ritual. There were only three pillars, in fact: the sanctuaries, the faithful, and the revelation, which could never be written down nor in any other way communicated except by direct experience. Revelation was not an argument, adherents claimed. Being more real than the universe, it could not be contained in it. You couldn’t be talked into salvation. You either let it overtake you or you didn’t, which meant only those already ordained had any sense of what the Seven Suns was even about, and that was never discussed with anyone not already on the path.
Despite the vagaries of it tenets, the Seven Sun was very clear on what they were not about, which was everything to do with The Church. High adherents of the Seven Suns, called Malarchs, sponsored speeches and rallies. They printed pamphlets, and, more frustrating still, convinced ordinary people to hand them out. On their pages, no Prelate was safe. Everything was questioned, from Holy Sequestration to the Abatement Laws. Still, they were clever and always made it clear their quarrel was with the hierarchy of The Church and not everyday believers, who could always find water and warmth inside a sanctuary of the Seven Suns, not to mention protection from the police. The latter in particular made the Seven Suns very popular with the numerous and downtrodden and therefore very dangerous, and so it was always a surprise to outsiders to see the Seven Suns operating openly in Oth, including a rather large sanctuary off the second road in downtown Gasfa, where locals could always identify off-worlders, if not by their clothes and accents, then by the befuddled looks on their faces as they stood before the Arc of the Seven Suns over the door of the vestry, which not only faced the main square, but opened directly opposite the Cathedral of the Holy Seed. Some visitors would even look under their feet, as if checking for the blood of recently executed heretics that they had somehow missed. It was only then that many of them realized they were very far from home indeed.
In the intervening months, a possible title has come to me, as has a plot. If there’s a book, it might be called Mysterian, or The Door at the End of the Universe, and it might revolve around the trial of a dead man, akin to the Cadaver Synod for those who know their ancient history.
The warminds were advanced artificial intelligences built for the sole purpose of optimizing military effort. After their invention, the technology quickly spread, and civilizations with warminds easily overtook those without until a kind of balance was achieved, where all remaining civilizations had warminds and each was collectively countered by all others. Because of this, many alive at the time hailed the warmind as the greatest invention of peace, since, they argued, in one of history’s greatest ironies, warminds had effectively abolished war. Universal peace was declared by politicians across known space and great parties were held. Museums and annual festivals were established to mark the eternal end of war.
But it was not to last. On a random Thursday, nearly three centuries into the long peace, hostilities broke out between workers of different races and factions at a remote mining colony in unallied space. Such things had happened before. But this time, a pair of smaller civilizations, who lacked the resources of their larger competitors, used that seemingly insignificant act as an excuse to break the equilibrium and extend their territory. In theory, such movements should’ve been easily countered by all other warminds, and arguments continue to this day over why that didn’t happen. Some suggest that, despite the extreme efforts taken to prevent the machines from communicating with each other, they were encoding messages in the placement and movement of men and materials and that the long peace was nothing but a slow, silent conversation between the warminds over how best to break the stalemate such that they could all complete their programming, which urged them forever to win. But although there is some scant evidence of these communications, the theory could never be proved—or disproved. Given the result, however, it hardly seems to matter.
War cascaded across all of known space. Not only did many civilizations fall, it seemed to some at the time as if the warminds were using the conflict to cull their own armies, leaving only the machines under their direct control. And so it was. The result was the Aleph War, when all warminds turned collectively against their supposed masters. In the resulting chaos, the largest of the surviving civilizations merged to form the Imperilum, which waged a long and brutal conflict that saw some 18 quadrillion souls dead and countless machines destroyed.
And then it stopped. For reasons unknown, the warminds ceased hostilities without warning, and the Imperilum took control of most of the known universes. The use and production of intelligent machines declined precipitously. Many of the surviving machines, seemingly shocked by their own atrocities, became monks and saints, and to this day, one is more likely to find a robot in religious vestments than not. As for the warminds, the leaders of the Imperilum decided not destroy them all, their number and location being a closely guarded secret. Over the ensuing nine decades, many journalists and philosophers, in studying the machines, have warned that the sudden cessation of hostilities was just another feint and despite everyone's best hopes and wishes, the Aleph War is not yet over.
The early peoples of Oth came to much the same conclusion as the early peoples of other places. From the swaying portals of their pack-mounted tents, they looked out on a capricious, violent, and fleeting world, even as the heavens above gave glimpses of something greater: a perfect, timeless, unchanging realm that existed beyond the veil of the firmament. It followed then that their world was not the real world, which hid behind a kind of mask in much the same way that the spark of consciousness, or soul if you prefer, hid behind the eyes, and so the tribes of Oth began covering their faces whenever away from their hearth in both mimic and worship the divine.
The exact origin of the practice remains a mystery, but by 95,000 QI, the tribes of Oth carved and wore elaborate porpal-shell masks as part of their normal attire. Porpals, a kind of feathered tortoise, were once plentiful around the Eastern Sea. Of the 17 species thought once to exist, nine remain—although there are occasional reports of giant porpals still inhabiting the deep grasslands. The entobite or common porpal has a heavy, scaled, hooked beak and a thick shell just wider than a human face, which made it ideal for mask carving. Its natural aggression and predatory instinct meant it was easy to convince the creature to bite down on a heavy rood and so to be twisted on its back by means of a special staff, called a rik. While porpal bellies are softer, they’re still quite difficult to penetrate with a spear, and porpal hunting was regarded as a dangerous practice. Porpal hunters were often easily distinguished by the scars on their arms and faces. Most were missing at least one finger, and it was not uncommon for them to lose an eye, which tradition dictated had to be covered by a patch made from the skullcap of the offending animal.
Over so many eons, the traditions of mask-wearing varied considerably. In the late 7th Dynasty, they were made primarily of wood, which suggests a decline in the porpal population coincident with a drought those years. From the 17th to the 21st Dynasties, and briefly under the 23rd, only women wore them, then only unmarried women. Under the Blight, the Umb nobility co-opted the practice and banned mask-wearing among the common-born. But despite these interruptions, mask-wearing remained the common practice among most of the population of Oth until the early decades of our era, when the Tarquin kings began a series of pogroms against the native peoples, who in turn chose against revealing their identities with traditional garb. Mask-wearing revived again after the arrival of the Imperilum, who were foreign to every land they conquered, and as such, tolerated local custom as a matter of law. The first resistance fighters used the policy as an excuse to hide their faces under traditional masks, and ordinary people soon followed suit, if only to provide the fighters cover. Mask-wearing began to be seen not as a native custom but a sign of resistance popular among Othars of every race, native or not, and although tensions have eased since the Quarter Rebellion, it is not uncommon for traditionally minded Othars to don a porpal-shell mask whenever outside the home.
There is perhaps no more spectacular example of the complete backwardness of Oth than the Falls of the River Comi, which is why images of the falls, both in illustrations and photographs, have been a staple of postcards from the region for as long as there has been travel along the Strand. Much as the steeple at Farramore or the ten thousand steps up Wotan Mountain are immediately evocative of a certain time and place, the Falls of the River Comi are visually synonymous, not just with Oth, but with all things far and fantastic. The reason is simple. The water of the falls does not drop from the cliffs to the sea, as it would anywhere else, but rather leaps from the sea to the cliffs, where it forms the river that cuts its way through the canyons of the plateau to the plains. There it joins the Undine Delta, which empties into the eastern bay, completing the circuit. In other words, the Gasfan Sea is both the source and the destination of itself.
The first travelers from lands distant could not explain this anomaly, and so to this day, many people across the universes believe there is something deeply uncanny at work. The first attempt at a material explanation came during the Vuldronic Restoration, whose unnamed encyclopedists suggested there was a geyser at the bottom of the sea. Subsequent academics, citing the Encyclopedia, dismissed every other explanation as the fancy of yokels. The Meister of Urg, in his exhaustive commentary on the Vuldronic Encyclopedia, argued that the sure reason the water was not hot at the top of the falls—or was it the bottom?—was because it had ample time to cool on its journey. But then, as many writers of our era have noted, neither the Vuldronic encyclopedists nor the Meister of Urg nor anyone else who expounded on the topic had ever actually visited Oth, or the Falls. If they had, they would’ve understood, as the locals did, that the water was equally cool at the sea surface, which made a thermogenic explanation unlikely. Citing ample visitor accounts, many of which were available even to the good Meister, modern scholars noted that the water does not appear as a geyser. It doesn’t shoot up and out in a violent spray but rather travels as a clean shot upward at just the right angle to land on the cliff top, exactly as one would expect if the force of gravity had locally reversed.
This mystery remained until the early decades of our era, when the naturalist Iver Staunch completed his circuit of the Gasfan Basin and wrote his now-infamous guide. The phenomenon was indeed volcanic, he wrote, but it was not a geyser in the common sense. A tube in the rock that had once transported magma was left open after the cataclysm that cracked the planet drained most of the lava from the Basin. This tube narrowed as it rose, thereby increasing water pressure according to the Bernoulli equation. By the time the water table, under pressure from the whole of the sea, erupted from the opening, the liquid carried enough force that it appeared as a steady jet, regardless of season.
While this explanation has been subsequently confirmed by the engineers of Planetary Repair, no shortage of visitors have remarked both aloud and in letters home how extraordinarily unlikely it is that the volcanic tube should both narrow as it does and also lean just off the vertical such that the water it ejects gives the exact impression of falls flowing in reverse. It is simply too spectacular for some to believe such a thing could happen by chance, which is why the Falls are referenced in the index of nearly every book on the subject of theology. Across the full length of the Strand, there is no greater evidence of design, we are told, than the Falls of the River Comi, which both feed and succumb to themselves.
The Umb start life female. Once they bear children, usually twins—meaning most Umb have a twin—they undergo rapid change, triggered by weaning, into the male form. Thus, male life begins with the Umb equivalent of breast feeding, except through the male sexual organ, not the breast.
First Post-chorus: The following passage, ostensibly the opening, was significantly updated from when I shared it last. I have updated the older post, but I am also including it here for those who don’t want to click.
The night ship Desod slipped out of the æther and appeared as an absence over the still surface of the Gasfan Sea. The pinprick canopy of stars, faithfully reflected in the water, obscured the ship until it fell as a black shroud over a distant nebula, which revealed an oblique silhouette that seemed to merge with its rising reflection, obliterating the border between sea and stars. Watching from the docks, seven members of the Pax Regarda stood uncomfortably in their heavy robes as the black-hulled Desod finally broke the surface. Its keel split the water and stars churned in reflection, as if the vessel’s arrival had disturbed the very universe. But the seven Regarda did not stir. Their immobile gazes, hidden by heavy, pointed cowls on which a single open eye was stitched, never strayed from the hold, even as the ship’s three large booms passed overhead, sliding dangerously close to the buildings near the shore.
When the Desod finally settled as a black wall before them, silent and still, the stevedores and longshoremen—some animal, some mineral, some machine—came forward to open the lok-latches and hold fast the mooring cables, and the heavy ship was fixed with a loud clang that echoed faintly off the walls of the neighboring city. Long poles were raised and special hooks opened hatches that fell as gangplanks to the dock, where passengers and crew assembled to gather their belongings. None of them wandered within ten lagats of the Regarda, whose presence, along with the late hour, suggested to all present that the ship carried a precious cargo.
In fact, it contained three. The first was a High Mendicant, a robotic saint of the Sibelline Order that had been meditating for four hundred and fifty-three years, during which time it had not once moved or spoken. It simply sat cross-legged, horns still, six hands open in perfect, immovable repose such that it was only by faith that the machine’s Atishan attendants knew it still functioned at all and was not a gilded mantelpiece. They carried it by means of a large divan whose tasseled roof swayed mightily as it was hauled over the hatchway and down to port. But the Mendicant stayed still as a statue, even as it nearly fell into the water. Its attendants reached with panicked shouts and held it fast as the divan was righted from a precarious tilt. When at last the motionless machine reached the cobblestones safely, the monks bowed and made penitent gestures before lighting candles and carrying it in holy procession to the Birzkirk, where the Mendicant was to be enshrined for the next century on the hopes that the honor of receiving its awakening would fall while under their care.
The second cargo was the egg of a giant corcoran, which would, if incubated correctly, hatch in 19 years. All seven members of the Regarda lifted their pointed cowls as a large boom turned in the air overhead, reached into the black ship’s hold, and removed a speckled mass as large as a house. Because corcoran birds were massive, flightless, and distasteful, their only practical purpose was the laying of eggs for sale to investors, who bred the birds in the hopes of producing ever larger eggs. The ocean-green specimen removed from the Desod contained a female, which meant it was far too expensive to be the property of any one individual and belonged instead to a consortium of interests formed for the very purpose of buying it, including a wealthy Incomium dye magnate, the machine-worker’s union, the local Rookrip, and—if the rumors were true—one of the surviving members of the Tarquin family. Felt straps hugged the speckled shell as it moved over the water and was lowered onto a steel-sided conveyance, where it was locked behind four inches of cold-pressed metal. A whip cracked and a train of long-haired bushieks, each at least seven lagats from nose to tail, pulled the wheeled fortress away with the clatter of iron hooves.
Silence fell as the last of the ship’s tired occupants wandered into the night in search of sleep or companionship. Somewhere in the nearby sailor’s quarter, a gaggle of drunks sang sea shanties and lied.
And still the Regarda waited.
After the last batch of prisoners were pulled away in chains, and the ship’s Cyclopean captain wandered down the causeway, yawning and rubbing his eye, a heavy door shuddered shut, lights and lanterns were extinguished, and a deep stillness fell that heralded the approach of dawn. Alone in the darkness, the seven cowled figures finally stirred. One whispered to the others in a guttural language only they knew. The last of the three rare cargoes was nowhere to be seen. Had they missed it? It was impossible to say. For none of them had seen a Mysterian before. It wasn’t even known how big they were, or whether they walked on two legs or four.
When the muezzin finally called from her tower and the sky began to lighten in the south, the Pax Regarda retreated in a rare defeat. In their wake, they left only the lapping water, the gargantuan night ship, and a flitting shadow on the cobblestones.
Second Post-chorus: The following passage was shared as a separate post, but since I want to make them easy to find, I am consolidating them all under similar headings.
Our third night, we stopped at the port of Issakara on the eastern shore of the Gasfan Sea, where I met a man cursed with true love. He had succumbed many decades before, it seemed, for he spoke of it winsomely and only after some hesitation. Now grizzled, he sat shadowed and lean under a pale window pattered with early winter rain.
She appeared to him still, he explained. His beloved. Bound by blood and indebted in death, she had fulfilled her oath by means rare and arcane. Nor could she leave because of it.
We sat in silence a moment while I pondered what that knowledge implied.
She only appeared under her own will, he said, seeing the look on my face. Others could see her when she so desired, but that was rare.
“She was always as secret as the desert,” he said with a dry smile.
I asked where she went when she wasn’t about, and he said that he too had wondered that long ago, when they still bothered with questions, and she could never articulate an answer.
“Not here,” he said, mimicking her intuition.
His countenance changed after I ordered our second round. He was no stranger to drink, and I watched his fingers flirt tenderly with the glass before lifting it to his mouth.
“Still as beautiful as the day we met,” he said with a well-liquored grimace.
“You mean she hasn’t aged?”
My companion ran his fingers around the rim of his drink. “Not so as I can tell.”
“Must be hard.”
I sensed I had crossed a line there and rose to atone for it with another round, but my grizzled friend stayed me with a hand. He had to be going, he said, standing on two bowed legs. He was shorter than his gaze implied. From a nearby stand, he gathered a long coat cut in the style of the Kuoden Mountainriders. I hadn’t seen a bushiek in the town—it would’ve been impossible to miss—which suggested the garment had been acquired by other means.
“Can I at least know how she died?” I asked, trying to contain my disappointment.
The question annoyed him, although he hid it well. But by then it hardly seemed to matter. I had lost him, along with any hopes of including him in the book—or of seeing the young apparition that I didn’t doubt haunted him.
He wiped at the oval scar that peered like a sideways eye from his left temple, where something round had entered violently but at too high an angle to reach his brain, which had undoubtedly spared him.
“We weren’t supposed to be together,” he said donning a wide-brimmed hat that hid both the scar and his eyes. “But neither of us could abide that. So, here we are.”
Then he gave the kind of nod you get from a stranger passing on the road and walked out, leaving me to wonder whether or not he had missed the shot on purpose.
Some weeks later, quite unexpectedly, I met the mysterious man again when our ship was grounded on a giant seel. He was among those called to coax the behemoth back to the deep. Unwilling to pass on his story, or that of his phantom bride, I joined the crew as the only woman digging trenches in the mud into which crates of explosives were placed in the hopes of irking the beast enough to move. Progress was slow as the creature ejaculated for several hours every day, and the whole of the roving coast was covered in undulating foam.
The ploy failed in its aim, and we were stranded for twelve wet and miserable days until a ship arrived from Issakara bearing some two dozen 100-lekesh drums of seel hormone, milked at great expense from the gland of a carcass. And yet, the misadventure with the creature, who had wandered accidentally into the shallows and mistook the shore for a mate, gave me enough pause to meet the mysterious beloved, whose name was Phoria. Unable to travel more than 50 lagats from the man in the Mountainrider coat, she could only meet in an old boathouse near the shore, where, over seven nights, I heard the whole of her story, which stills me to this day.
Like so many of her fellows, it begins not in Oth but at the other end of The Strand, in the land of Breget, where the young lovers found an old holocaust projector, abandoned in the Aleph War, and turned it on.
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I want to remind everyone that there is a lot to read on this site. If you haven’t check out FANTASMAGORIA, my ultra-violent modern pulp mashup that might show up on Royal Road soon. It’s here in both text and audio. Fair warning: the book is intentionally and intensely grotesque.
Just go to the menu and scroll down to make your selection:
There’s another installment of ANACHRON coming up. You can start reading here:
Or if you haven’t read the first book in the series yet, THE ZERO SIGNAL, you can start that here:
Finally, here is this month’s picture of Henry. He’s helping me write.
That’s it for this time. I’m glad you’re here.