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Summary: You are a Healer. There are few with your Destiny and even fewer with your track record of coming back from the dead.
Part of the Destiny universe which includes Being Villagers
------.
You are a Healer.
The battlefield roars around you. Mud-stained armor, soot-cloaked faces, blood-soaked flashes of metal. The colors of war are a kaleidoscope that you desperately try to track, pushing your gold-rimmed glasses up your nose with the back of your wrist as you drop to your knees by the next patient. Over the waves of violence there is the canopy of a white tent slowly being eaten by flames.
Well. Looks like you won’t be taking this wounded soldier to the infirmary. Not that you could lift them anyway. Your arms are truly spent from carrying patient after patient out of the melee.
Your heart is spent when you see the soldier you’re working on now is the same from a quarter of an hour ago.
“I told you not to run back out,” you say. Your voice is level. Calm. Tears push behind your eyes and stubbornly stick there, a hot pressure that is starting to make your nose run. You sniffle and stubbornly grit your teeth against your wobbling chin. “Healing takes an hour to set.”
This soldier is already living dead. The wound you healed – a puncture to the upper right chest – is mottled purple and red. Infection. Your power speeds healing which is why it’s imperative that your patients don’t go rolling around in ooze for at least thirty minutes. The infection isn’t why he’s dying though.
The laceration that cuts jagged through his fleshy stomach and into his wet bowels is what makes him living dead.
“No,” the soldier says. His brown eyes are amber in the dying light. Such a waste of a beautiful clear day. He reaches up to grab your forearm, fingers spasming. He coughs. “No, I—I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not. I’m a Baker.”
You know. He told you this less than an hour ago when you first dragged him from the hungry maw of death. His name is Jer and his mother wanted him to take over the restaurant. She didn’t see the difference between a Cook and a Baker. He did and his need for capital is what led him to sign up for the Lord Neid’s army. One hundred gold pieces for just one year of service. Too good to be true.
Not enough is what you would have told him if he’d asked. One hundred gold for a life? It wasn’t nearly enough.
A shield comes flying, wheeling through the air like a blade. You fling up your arm a moment before it would have hit your face and have the pleasure of feeling your forearm break instead of your cheekbone. You grab at the break with an anguished hiss. The pain blinds you.
By the time you remember your patient, he’s dead.
You stagger up. A steady green glow emanates from under your palm, chasing the pain from your broken bone. Healing yourself has always been easier, months of trial and error on your own body creating a muscle memory you’ve never developed for others. Your gaze darts. The backline is quickly dissolving into the frontline. The enemy – whoever the fuck it is, the one wearing red capes instead of blue – is hacking at your side like lumberjacks at trees. Your white healing robes are nearly black with mud. It’s not a stretch to imagine one of the desperate combatants from either side striking you down without ever noticing the concentric circles on either side of your lapels marking you as a Healer.
At last, at last, you feel the spell around your throat loosen. A sharp ding! trills in your head. A new compulsion settles into your bones.
Retreat. Find the Lord. Now.
The relief of being free to flee is short-lived. The Lord will be furious at the results of today’s battle. Never mind that his advisors all cautioned him against directly attacking another Lord on their land. Never mind that his Knights told him that an untrained force – no matter the size – wouldn’t win against a Duke’s forces. Never mind the hundreds of reasons that Lord Neid lost. It will be your fault. For not being fast enough or cunning enough or strong enough—
The fear of the Lord is costly. This whole time you’ve managed to not falter in your duty, to plunge into chaos and rescue patient after patient, to march forward even as your legs began to shake. But now you stumble as you turn to obey your commands. Fall to one knee.
There’s a whistling, deeper and meaner than the whistling of an arrow. Something collides with the back of your head and the sound is so loud that the compulsion is shaken right out of your bones.
You fall forward into the cold mud. Your vision is bleary though from the blow or the mud, you don’t know. You don’t know a lot, actually.
Blackness consumes you.
----.The start.---
You become a Healer a quarter mile underground, deep in the mines where only the adults are allowed to go. It’s been a long time since the collapse, and the air is thick and borderline unbreathable. You would consider it fully unbreathable if you weren’t still conscious. You sit with your back against the wall, head tilted so you can gaze sightlessly at the stone above. Salvation is a quarter mile above you at most. Or, in the best case scenario, a few meters in the next tunnel over. Your lip curls. It hardly mattered. A mile of rock and a few feet of it are all the same when you don’t have the tools to dig it.
Sisi coughs again, her chest seizing so hard that her head nearly lifts from your lap. You press your cold hand against her burning forehead, shushing her as best you can through dry, cracking lips.
“Some b-birthday,” she whispers.
You can’t see her face, but your mind has gotten quite good at conjuring in the darkness. You take a moment to paint her red hair sweeping back in big, loose curls, her constellation of freckles darting across her high-bridged nose, the sweet twinkle of firelight in her grey eyes. Of course there probably isn’t really a twinkle in her eyes now or the healthy flush that you remember from last week’s horseback riding adventure. You clear your throat. “Not yet.”
Sisi swallows, the sound loud. The tunnel collapse has only left you with a cage about seven feet in any direction. When both of you are silent, you can hear your blood moving through your veins. Sisi gathers her strength and asks, “How long…?”
You don’t know how long the two of you have been trapped. Neither do you know how long until you’re rescued or how long until your birthday. The blood at your hairline is dry and flaky, no longer tacky. “Two days, probably.”
“Then soon,” Sisi says. There’s a light pressure on your left arm. Sisi has wasted the strength to touch the spot your Destiny is supposed to appear. “I’ll be the f-first to know.”
There’s no humor in her voice. She doesn’t have the energy for it. Still, a bubble of mirth fizzles up your throat. She’d begged you to let her be the first to read your Destiny, even before your parents. She said that, as your best friend, it was her right. You hadn’t promised her, even when she pointed out that you’d been the first to know she’d gotten Villager. “You always have to have your way.”
Her hand falls away from your arm and hits the ground with a dull thud. You panic until you realize you can still hear her thready breath. She’s fallen asleep. Please let it only be sleep.
You stroke her hair. Sisi is hurt worse than you. When the support gave, she grabbed your hand and forced you to run long before your brain realized what was happening. And when the rock above you groaned, she slung you forward, throwing herself on top of you as the world collapsed. Now the only thing you can do for her is cushion her head and answer when she speaks and listen for the sound of her breath in the endless quiet of the underground.
It might not be a bad idea for you to sleep too.
---Now---
Waking is boring. You have the sick taste of healing at the back of your mouth. Your head is clear. If another Healer had tended you, you’d still be foggy. Mildly concussed. The clarity tells you that once again your muscle memory has saved you. Even knocked out, your self-healing is top tier.
Your glasses are gone, but you can guess where you are. You smell underground and there’s torchlight flickering through your eyelids. You’re not wearing your glasses so you don’t bother opening your eyes yet. You won’t be able to see anything without them.
Not that you need to.
You’re in a cell. That’s also boring. The inside of Lord Neid’s cells are like a second home to you. It’s where he stores his pet Healer when his pet Witch spends too long on missions and the spells wear off. You reach out to the nail wedged between the stones above the head of your cot. With any luck, whoever retrieved you from the battlefield also retrieved your glasses. If they did, they’ll have hung them up in the usual spot—
There is no nail. There is no stone. Wood meets the pads of your fingers. The smell of underground – you haven’t mistaken that. However there is no accompanying smell of damp or mildew. Instead, there’s the scent of a wood-burning stove, laundry soap and…perfume?
You jolt upright. Your robes are gone. You’re wearing a nightgown that’s nearly as soft as the blanket that crumples into your lap. You blink quickly, squinting through the torchlight. There are bars surrounding you, but that’s where the similarity ends. Wherever you are is paneled in oak, the bed you’re lying on a four-poster rather than a cot, and there is a fire crackling in a hearth across the room from your cell. You can just make out someone sitting next to it, on a stool next to a small table.
The person shifts. There comes the sound of paper rustling and then the rounded puff of air that comes from a heavy book being closed. “You’re awake.” The woman doesn’t sound upset. In fact, she sounds pleased and a little surprised. “My doctors assured me it would be another day yet.”
She’s little more than a dark figure even when she stands and walks closer to your cell. Her clothes could be a black cape or a black dress and her head is either topped with a truly impressive amount of thick, black hair or a wide hood. There is a glimmer of silver at her throat and on her hands when she gestures to the bars. “I am sorry for the cell, Healer. It’s only until the spells wear off.”
Healer. Your hand flies to your upper arm, covering the letters instinctively. You can feel the spells at your throat circling like a snake. You don’t need to ask what will happen when Lord Neid’s spells wear off. New ones will assuredly be put on. “Where am I?”
“Behind enemy lines,” the woman says dryly. “I told Neid not to test me.”
Your head throbs. Whatever luck you might have had has run out. “You’re the Lord.”
“Lady,” the woman corrects. She moves back to the table. There’s scraping as she drags her stool to the front of your cell. “Duchess, actually. Duchess Genevieve Axelon, though you can call me Lady Gen.”
Lord Neid attacked the Duchess? You press the heel of your hand to your eye. “Am I being charged with treason then, Duchess?” Any act against the Duchess, the King’s cousin, would surely be seen as an attack on the royal family.
“You were going to be,” Lady Gen agrees. “Until my Knight recognized those spell markings. Now we have options.” She settles on her stool and considers you. “There have been many tales about you, Healer. Your existence has given Lord Neid’s household a reputation. They say you can heal any wound, even those afflicted by demon beasts. They say you can bring people back from the dead.”
“Nobody can be brought back from the dead,” you say. “Not in their entirety.” A body is a simple thing to order around. The compulsion around your throat squeezes as if just realizing you’ve woken. You hiss, eyes falling shut and your hand moves from your arm to your throat. Come back. Find Lord Neid. NOW. The words pulse through your bones louder and louder until your teeth chatter.
“The next few days will be painful,” Lady Gen observes. You hear her from a long way off. Is she pitying you? “I’m sorry. I have no Witch to offer a counterspell. I also cannot allow you to return to Lord Neid.”
You gasp through the next wave of pain. Like the tides, it laps at you hungrily, building its momentum. “I do not want to go back.”
“Not now,” Lady Gen says. She rises in a rustling of skirts. “I’m told that that compulsion won’t kill you, but it will feel like it’s trying to. You must remember to eat and drink when you can. If you can bear with it, through it, we can talk of freedom, Healer.”
The word lands like a blow more surely aimed than the thorns beginning to poke down your spine. “F-freedom?” Suspicion worms through you. “Whose?”
“Yours,” Lady Gen says.
---The start—
Sisi doesn’t answer when you call anymore. Your legs are numb under her head, and you’d be worried about paralysis if you weren’t still able to wiggle your toes. You won’t move her. Her breathing went funny when you tried to shift her last time, like water got stuck in the back of her throat, and you don’t ever want to hear that sound again.
When the two of you first set out to explore the tunnels, there’d only been four days left before your birthday. You’ve wracked your memory repeatedly to be sure. It feels as if you’ve been buried for weeks, but that can’t be. Everyone says getting your Destiny burns and your arm is as cold as the rest of you. That means it hasn’t even been four days.
Nobody is coming. There’s the possibility that more than this tunnel was affected in the collapse. They could be digging in the wrong place or not able to reach this section of the mine. There was a reason this section was marked for the adults only. Maybe they stopped looking days ago and thought well they should have known better.
No. No, you know that last thought isn’t true. Sisi’s parents are miners. They know that miracles can happen down in the shafts and they won’t give up until they’re sure their daughter isn’t one of them. And your parents may be older and frailer, but they’re also former adventurers. You’re sure that they’ll fight until the end to find you.
It’s this thought that finally spurs you into action. You’ve always been told by the village Chief – a Miner – to never dig if you’re in a collapse. Any movement could cause more instability and cause another cave in; one you wouldn’t survive. But it’s been at least three days and there hasn’t been even a whisper of rescue. Sisi is just getting worse and worse and you have to do something. If you’re going to die down here, you want it to be in a way your parents can be proud of.
You want to fight until the very end.
You ease Sisi off your lap, carefully arrange a pile of debris under her head so her neck stays at the same angle. It can’t be comfortable, but Sisi doesn’t wake.
“I’m going to get us out of here,” you whisper to her. Your legs shake as you stand. You feel the top of the tunnel. The spot where you and Sisi were sitting is under a support that feels mostly intact. With any luck, Sisi will be protected if your digging triggers another collapse.
You shove your fingers under the first stone and yank. With a quick chatter of disapproval, it jumps. You yank again. It falls. A river of dirt and gravel drops from the ceiling to fill the space like sand in an hourglass. You scoop it behind you. Find the next rock. Yank. Gravel and dust falls. You choke on the dust. Scoop it away. Push and pull and yank.
The rhythm of digging becomes your heartbeat. Your fingers bend backwards and your nails wear down to nothing. Your arms burn. Each time the rock scrapes and the pebbles clatter, that’s victory. Every time your muscles scream and rocks bark their protest, that’s fighting. If your parents find your body with you hands worn to nubs, at least they’ll know you tried.
When a gentle green glow begins to light your way, you barely notice through the treacherous tears.
You dig.
-----. Now---
Witchcraft is a mean practice. The Witch’s compulsion hooks under your skin and spears into your bones when you least expect it. Move. Go. Find Lord Neid. When you’re able to resist, you lie in bed, scarred fingers fisted in the bed sheets and eyes fixed sightlessly on the wood paneling above you. The magic hates when you’re inactive and does its best to motivate you. The soles of your feet burn and your lungs ache for air as the spell twines around your throat. The only thing that relieves the pressure is to stand and take a faltering step in the direction you know Lord Neid to be. But that’s all you have room for. A single step.
Then the burning starts again.
When you aren’t able to resist, you find yourself scratching at the bars of your cell as if your nails are strong enough to chip metal. Your fingers break and bleed, but your healing needs only a moment to fix it. Your cell glows green as you break and repair, break and repair, break and repair under the weight of your compulsions. You know you beg in these moments. There’s always a guard posted by the fireplace and you promise them any number of healings to free you, promise them years of your servitude, promise them every bit of gold that you don’t have. If the guards answer you, you don’t know. The compulsion screams in your mind and drowns out even the sound of your own breaking bones.
Then there are the moments your leash rests. The spell retreats like a hungry tiger, circling and looking for a new angle of attack. When this happens, you try to sleep. Then, eventually, these moments occur more often. The teeth of the spell are wiggling, bleeding at the gums, starting to fall out.
In one of these peaceful times, Lady Gen comes to visit again.
“I’ve had my Rogue look into you,” Lady Gen says. She drops the Destiny as if it’s the most normal thing in the world and not one of the ten outlawed. Well, former outlawed. This King doesn't hold the same biases as his predecessor. She continues. “I’d like to confirm a few things.”
You expect her to ask questions about Lord Neid or the master you had before him. It’s not hard to find information on your past. As a Healer, you’re coveted. When the underground put you up for sale, people from all over rushed to put in a bid before the Crown had a chance to shut it down. You stand, feeling wrong to sit in front of a Lady now that you’re feeling better, and croak, “Alright.”
Lady Gen flips through some paper. “You’ve been in Lord Neid’s hands for two years?”
“Three. It took him half a year to find a Witch.” You’d refused to perform any sort of healing for the first year he had you. You fought the entire way through the ritual and, even with the Witch’s spell tattooed across your throat, you still dared to heal Lord Neid wrong the first time he asked. Your lip curls. The scar cutting across his cheek and dragging at the corner of his eye is the best gift you’ve ever given. You rock on your heels. “It took another six months to get the compulsions right.”
“You’re twenty-two years old?”
“Probably.” You’re not sure how long the Underground kept you before the auction.
“There’s a report you once regrew another captured person’s arm.”
You shake your head. “Reattached.”
You can feel her eyes on you. “There’s no record of any other Healer being able to perform the same feat.”
“I haven’t met any other Healer,” you say. “I’m sure they could if given the right incentive.”
Lady Gen is curious. “What was the right incentive for you?”
“I wanted the kid to have an arm,” you say. You pause and admit, “Her dad also helped convince me.”
Another flip of a page. “Hero Bern.”
A name you haven’t heard in a long time. For a moment the scent of underground is joined by clove and spice. The face that swims to the front of your memory is mostly patched salt-and-pepper bear and kind brown eyes. You remember the wide, calloused hand that never let go of the thin, frail one by his side.
“We called him the Big B,” you say. “Didn’t know he was a Hero until the jailbreak.”
“You were assumed dead during said jailbreak.”
You shrug. “They jumped to conclusions.”
“The castle came down on your head. And the two levels of dungeons above you.” When you don’t answer, Lady Gen sighs. “You must have felt so abandoned. Hero Bern did try to save you. He was devastated to hear you were still alive.”
You raise an eyebrow. The spell is rousing itself, sliding its scales against your jugular.
“Alive and recaptured,” Lady Gen corrects. “He failed to uphold his end of the deal.” Her voice softens. “He and his daughter paid their respects in your hometown. They begged your parents for forgiveness.”
“My hometown?” Your heart jumps. Even to Big B, you never gave your name. Never told them where you came from. You were captured on the road to the Capital after being foolish enough to display your power to the wrong, demon-wounded merchant. Your tongue feels thick and heavy. You shake your head. “No. No, I—” Don’t have a hometown. The denial is stuck in your throat.
“My Rogue was impressed by how many times you’ve been assumed dead,” Lady Gen says. Her voice softens. “Even when they assumed you dead, your parents never stopped looking for you, Elodie.”
The sound of your name is a lightning bolt. Your heart pounds. “I—They—” Your knees shake. She knows your name. That’s your name. You fall back onto your bed. Instinctively, green light fills your palm, and you clasp it over your chest. There’s nothing to heal. Your heart pounds against your ribs. “I’m—”
Lady Gen sets her notes down. “Elodie?”
Grey tugs at the corners of your vision. Hope and terror and pain claw at each other. You suck in breath after breath. A ghost whispers in your ear.
“Elodie?”
---the start---
“Elodie?”
Sisi’s thin voice shocks you. Your hands buzz as they still for the first time in hours. The aftershock of your digging feels like bees in your bones. You’re more shocked as you turn and see her for the first time in days, cast in a simmering green glow that emphasizes the sick hollows of her cheek and the blackness of the blood caked in her red hair. “Sisi!”
You fall to her side. The power that courses through you – you’re an idiot. The same power that’s healed your nailbeds into durable scars should have been used on her first. You grasp her hand and wrestle with the energy inside of you. The green shine is reluctant to leave you, but you brute force it from your chest, down your arms and under her skin. It’s not easy and the hiss that slips from both of you tells you it’s not pleasant either.
But it works.
Sisi’s breath evens and eases. Her long lashes cast deep shadows across her face. “Elodie…are you…?”
Your Destiny burns on your arm. “Healer.” You’re dehydrated and tired and hurt and scared, but you can’t help but grin. “You’re the first to know.”
“As I should be,” Sisi says. She tries to sit up and gasps. “Ow.”
“Stay still.” You make yourself go back to the hole you’ve been working on. You don’t think it’s your imagination that the air is easier to breathe or that there is a faint flow coming through the cracks in the stones. You don’t want to get her hopes up. “I’ll work on this.”
Sisi cocks her head as you grasp the first rock. “Wait. Do you hear that?”
From a very long way off, metal strikes stones.
---Now---
It is another day before the spell breaks. It’s a strange feeling when it does. You wake at dawn to the feeling of open spaces, as if you went to bed in a cave only to find yourself in the center of a glade the next morning, dew misting your face and the sweet sound of a creek singing in your ear.
You suck in a breath deeper than any before. Your ribs flare and your eyes open at the force of your exhalation. Free. You’re free.
Well. The walls of your cell press closer as you rub sleep from the corners of your eyes and sit up. You massage the bridge of your nose, wishing for your glasses. You are freer than before.
Now, with your mind clear and your body light, it’s time to find out what the Lady will do with your name and past in her hands.
From the day you were first captured on the road to see Sisi’s graduation, you’ve never told anyone your name. You’ve never wanted your family to be used against you. When your parents pulled you from the mine and learned your Destiny, they did your best to prepare you for what the world would want from you. They had told you to rely on them, to trust them to protect you, but you’d never wanted to put them in that position. Your elderly parents, beaten by years as adventurers, were not as strong as they pretended. The threats they hinted at during your lessons were too big. Too bloodthirsty. You’d been determined to bear your Destiny alone.
The door to the dungeon creaks open. You know the sound well by now, used to your rotation of guards and doctors. You get out of bed, smoothing the bed sheets the best you can. The stairs are winding and tedious. You have a moment to prepare yourself for whatever new leash is put around your neck.
You reach out for the water glass on the small meal table. You drink greedily and pause when you go to set the glass back. There’s a glimmer of gold on the table. Your glasses. Your scarred fingers would know the feel of them in complete darkness. A bubble of relief pops in your throat. At last you’ll be able to see clearly. Lady Gen’s voice may sound kind, but her face will reveal the truth.
You put them on and turn to face the rapidly approaching footsteps. You raise an eyebrow and fold your arms, tracking them through the stone wall as they approach the door to your dungeon room. Lady Gen isn’t alone today. Perhaps she’s bringing an advisor or Knight with her. Maybe she’s found her own Witch to tie you to her servitude. You aren’t opposed to serving the woman who saved you from Lord Neid. You prepare your stipulations. You definitely need to get paid this time, for one, and she shouldn’t touch your family—
The door flies open and pale, freckled face with a riot of red curls flies in. Grey eyes like the ocean glimmer. The young woman stops and covers her mouth with both hands. “Oh! Oh, Elodie.”
“Sisi,” you gasp. You stumble to the bars of your cell and somehow she is right there and her fingers are entwined with yours, palm to palm. The heat of her skin tells you this is real. You blink very quickly. It takes you several tries to speak without sobbing. “I missed your graduation.”
“Yeah,” she agrees. Sisi isn’t so reserved. Tears slip down her cheeks and her laugh is choked by tears. “You kind of owe me one.”
Behind her an older woman and a man come in. Their hair is grey (what they have left of it) and the woman has your wide nose and thin mouth. The man has your blindness, hidden behind thick glasses.
You look over Sisi’s shoulder at them, unable to let her go, feeling the barrier of your cell all the more keenly as a natural compulsion settles into your bones, begging you to run to them. Your breathing stutters. “You looked for me.”
Your dad’s chin trembles. “Every day.”
“We knew you wouldn’t give up,” your mother says. She pushes up next to Sisi, drags your father with her so that all three are pressed against the bars of your cell. “So neither did we.”
And you’re fifteen again, the gaps in the stone growing wider and wider to reveal your village on the other side, covered in dust and sweat. Hands grab at your arms, your shoulders, your back, pulling you into an embrace that feels like home. Your mother is telling you how proud she is, your father is shaking with the force of his tears, and Sisi is pressing kisses to your cheeks and to your forehead and thanking you for being alive.
An aggrieved sigh comes from behind your family. “If you’d waited, I could have unlocked the cell first.” Lady Gen slips efficiently past your mother to twist the key in the lock. “You make me feel like Neid, hugging through the bars like that.”
Arms and hands release you, step back, throw the door open. And then your family is all around you, burying you between their bodies in a way that should feel suffocating but instead feels even better than waking up without a compulsion around your neck.
You gawk at Lady Gen. Look to the open cell doors. Then back to Lady Gen, standing alone and unprotected in the dungeon. “You’re…releasing me?”
“The spell is gone,” Lady Gen says. She moves to her usual spot by the fireplace, settling onto the stool. She tilts her head and her thick, black hair falls like a waterfall over her shoulder. She’s more stunning that you could have guessed and, now that you can see her clearly, you’re mesmerized. She’s like a painting come to life. “You’re free. Like I said, now is the time to discuss your options.”
Sisi whispers in your ear. “When the pretty Lady offers you a job, take it, okay?”
“I offer quite the compensation package,” Lady Gen agrees. She gestures to the four of you. “Family relocation, for example.”
You are starting to like the sound of options.
------.
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Summary: Heroes are unique employees. When great power doesn't come with great responsibility, they don't send another hero. They send you.
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o’clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o’clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!
In the kitchen the breakfast stove gave a hissing sigh and ejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.
‘Today is August 4, 2026,’ said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, ‘in the city of Allendale, California.’ It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. ‘Today is Mr Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.’
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o’clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eightone! But no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels. It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: ‘Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today…’ And the rain tapped on the empty house, echoing.
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car. After a long wait the door swung down again.
At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away to the distant sea. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.
Nine-fifteen, sang the clock, time to clean.
Out of warrens in the wall, tiny robot mice darted. The rooms were acrawl with the small cleaning animals, all rubber and metal. They thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, like mysterious invaders, they popped into their burrows. Their pink electric eyes faded. The house was clean.
Ten o’clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint.
The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.
The five spots of paint—the man, the woman, the children, the ball—remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer.
The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.
Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, ‘Who goes there? What’s the password?’ and, getting no answer from lonely foxes and whining cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades in an old-maidenly preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia.
It quivered at each sound, the house did. If a sparrow brushed a window, the shade snapped up. The bird, startled, flew off! No, not even a bird must touch the house!
The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.
Twelve noon.
A dog whined, shivering, on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud. Behind it whirred angry mice, angry at having to pick up mud, angry at inconvenience.
For not a leaf fragment blew under the door but what the wall panels flipped open and the copper scrap rats flashed swiftly out. The offending dust, hair, or paper, seized in miniature steel jaws, was raced back to the burrows. There, down tubes which fed into the cellar, it was dropped into the sighing vent of an incinerator which sat like evil Baal in a dark corner.
The dog ran upstairs, hysterically yelping to each door, at last realizing, as the house realized, that only silence was here.
It sniffed the air and scratched the kitchen door. Behind the door, the stove was making pancakes which filled the house with a rich baked odor and the scent of maple syrup.
The dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire. It ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.
Two o’clock, sang a voice.
Delicately sensing decay at last, the regiments of mice hummed out as softly as blown gray leaves in an electrical wind.
Two-fifteen.
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.
Two thirty-five.
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads in a shower of pips. Martinis manifested on an oaken bench with egg-salad sandwiches. Music played. But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o’clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through thepaneled walls.
Four-thirty.
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers cavorting in crystal substance. The walls were glass. They looked out upon color and fantasy. Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the walls lived.
The nursery floor was woven to resemble a crisp, cereal meadow. Over this ran aluminum roaches and iron crickets, and in the hot still air butterflies of delicate red tissue wavered among the sharp aromas of animal spoors! There was the sound like a great matted yellow hive of bees within a dark bellows, the lazy bumble of a purring lion.
And there was the patter of okapi feet and the murmur of a fresh jungle rain, like other hoofs, falling upon the summer-starched grass. Now the walls dissolved into distances of parched weed, mile on mile, and warm endless sky. The animals drew away into thorn brakes and water holes.
It was the children’s hour.
Five o’clock. The bath filled with clear hot water.
Six, seven, eight o’clock. The dinner dishes manipulated like magic tricks, and in the study a click. In the metal stand opposite the hearth where a fire now blazed up warmly, a cigar popped out, half an inch of soft gray ash on it, smoking, waiting.
Nine o’clock. The beds warmed their hidden circuits, for nights were cool here.
Nine-five. A voice spoke from the study ceiling ‘Mrs McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?’ The house was silent.
The voice said at last, ‘Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random.’ Quiet music rose to back the voice. ‘Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite…
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly:
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
The fire burned on the stone hearth and the cigar fell away into a mound of quiet ash on its tray. The empty chairs faced each other between the silent walls, and the music played.
At ten o’clock the house began to die.
The wind blew. A falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window. Cleaning solvent, bottled, shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!
‘Fire!’ screamed a voice. The house lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the linoleum, licking, eating, under the kitchen door, while the voices took it up in chorus: ‘Fire, fire, fire!’
The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.
The house gave ground as the fire in ten billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room and then up the stairs. While scurrying water rats squeaked from the walls, pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. Somewhere, sighing, a pump shrugged to a stop. The quenching rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.
The fire crackled up the stairs.
It fed upon Picassos and Matisses in the upper halls, like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.
Now the fire lay in beds, stood in windows, changed the colors of drapes!
And then, reinforcements. From attic trapdoors, blind robot faces peered down with faucet mouths gushing green chemical.
The fire backed off, as even an elephant must at the sight of a dead snake. Now there were twenty snakes whipping over the floor, killing the fire with a clear cold venom of green froth.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flame outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered into bronze shrapnel on the beams.
The fire rushed back into every closet and felt of the clothes hung there.
The house shuddered, oak bone on bone, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat, its wire, its nerves revealed as if a surgeon had torn the skin off to let the red veins and capillaries quiver in the scalded air.
Help, help! Fire! Run, run! Heat snapped mirrors like the first brittle winter ice.
And the voices wailed, Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low, like children dying in a forest, alone, alone. And the voices fading as the wires popped their sheathings like hot chestnuts. One, two, three, four, five voices died.
In the nursery the jungle burned. Blue lions roared, purple giraffes bounded off. The panthers ran in circles, changing color, and ten million animals, running before the fire, vanished off toward a distant steaming river…
Ten more voices died. In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in, the slamming and opening front door, a thousand things happening, like a clock shop when each clock strikes the hour insanely before or after the other, a scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away! And one voice, with sublime disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud in the fiery study, until all the film spools burned, until all the wires withered and the circuits cracked.
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which, eaten by fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Deep freeze, armchair, film tapes, circuits, beds, and all like skeletons thrown in a cluttered mound deep under.
Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.
Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam:
‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’
Summary: Dulce is a Hero. The people who made her one better hope they never see her again. TW: mentions of violence, ptsd, panic attacks
————.
She is a villain when the adventure is over. It creeps up on her slowly. The shortened temper, the unnatural laughter, the darting eyes. She looks up at the corners of rooms for demon bats that don’t exist in this world and claws at her own flesh when she doesn’t find them.
Her companions come find her six months afterwards.
What does it look like, a prince and a knight and a mage walking into a McDonald’s? It’s 1 am, closing time, when she finds out.
“Dulce!” Prince Amor clanks through the fronts doors. He’s wearing the Royal Armor, the set that seems to glow from within with the Holy Light of his Blessed Ancestors. The crown on his head is as gold as his eyes. Everything about him looks fake under the artificial dining room lights, but he doesn’t notice. His golden eyes are locked on her. “At last, we’ve found you!”
She’s covered in a fine mist of oil, slashes of burns from the heat lamps marching up her arms. Her black pants are grey under a dusting of spilled flour and she knows her short, brown hair is frizzed up after her eight hour shift. She blinks at the three walking into the dining room and can’t find the words.
“I told you I’d find her,” Mage Kira says proudly. Her black dress looks like it belongs in a gothic version of the Nutcracker. She waves her flowering wand over her head. “Dulce’s magic has always been so distinctive, I knew it would be easy to find her in the Mundane World!”
Mundane world, Dulce thinks. That’s what they think of Earth. Mundane. Run-of-the-mill.
Not special.
Not worthy.
Dulce’s stomach cramps so badly that she sways on the spot. Why did she send the other girl home? Things would be so much easier if she had another human here.
You’re a daycare worker, watching over toddlers, when the imminent end of the world is announced. It becomes increasingly clear none of the kids’ parents are going to show up as the end inches nearer.
“Mom has been texting me for the last twenty minutes. She wants me to come home. It’s a four hour drive, when the roads are clear, and from what I hear everybody is trying to get somewhere right now. There’s no telling if I’d even-”
“Everybody else has left. All the other kids were picked up, the other staff left. They gave me all the keys. I promised to stay and wait for as long as- well. Even if some of the parents show up, I guess some of them won’t, so I’m just waiting. Until.”
[Clears throat.]
“A couple of people came after everybody left. Peter, one of Aidan’s fathers, gave me three hundred dollars for staying. What am I going to do with money? It’s- anyway. I kind of get it. He wanted to give me something.”
[Audio ends]
[Audio starts]
“They’re all between 2 and 4.” Sniff. “They’re so little. Too little to really- maybe if they were older, I’d have to tell them something. But um. I’m just- trying to stay calm and keep them happy and occupied. I think that’s the best thing, right now.”
[Heaving breaths.]
“I normally use this recorder to help me remember stuff. It’s just, uh, habit to talk to it. I don’t know. They’re napping, right now. I’ve got the baby monitor, they know that if they talk into it, I’ll come, so-”
[Sobbing.]
[Audio ends]
[Audio starts]
“Mom keeps texting, so I blocked her. I sent her a text telling her goodbye, first, but. I do. But these kids need me.”
[Sniff.]
“I tried calling their parents again, but I can’t get anybody. It’s just busy signals. I called the firefighter station, 911. I can’t get through to anybody.”
[Shaky breath.]
“I went out into the yard. Um, I think they can play. It’s nice out, and you can’t really see it yet. Little bit of a glimmer, if they ask I’ll just tell them it’s a plane, but it’s nice out and we’ve got hours before-”
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Hey so that was a great date, yeah, but I don't think it's going to work out. Nono you didn't do anything wrong, and I have indeed had a crush on you since we started high school, it's just... well, I didn't want to bring it up at the time but we kinda got sucked into a portal fantasy midway through. We saved the kingdom over and over, relying on our knowledge of and trust in each other every time, throwing ourselves into the firing line to protect each other and using each others' conviction as a rock. We got married and lived a happy life together until the portal sucked us back mid-battle and you gave up all your memories of our journey in order to save my life right when we ended up back in the coffee shop. Yeah that was when I got a bit weird and went to the bathroom.
Anyway I thought we could push on and make the date work but I have all of these memories of secrets that this you never chose to share, decisions that this you never made, and intimacies that this you never experienced. And it's kind of screwing with the vibe yeah. Also on the date it was really, blatantly clear that you're sixteen whereas I have memories of ruling a fantasy kingdom for thirty years so like... that's a problem all on its own. Anyway this you just feels more like a daughter to me. A daughter with the woman I gave my heart and soul to over and over and received like in return, only to lose her forever on the journey home. On the plus side I can definitely help you with your math homework now.
I think you should wear the brace, take the nap, ask for help, accept help joyfully, I think you should use the cane, the chair, you should sit down
I think you should put a cool or warm or one then the other cloth wet and clean against your face and focus on the temperature and if things align to allow it the aroma, and if not, then the cloth, I think you should focus on the weight, the texture,
again
the tempreture
to help
you relax.
I think you should take the ibuprofen. The asprin. The thing that works, for you, when you have this pain, that is available, handy, in your purse, in my purse, in someone's bag, in your bag, in my bag, we hand it to you, fetch you water. You thank me, them, yourself, for the water and manners are lovely and your appreciation is felt even if you do not thank them because
right now
talking is
the
last
thing.
I think you should buy the pre-cut pre-cooked just reheat just warm up just eat as is just sorted and I think you should remove the word "just" from these sentences you say to yourself as this is vitamins and minerals and carbohydrates and proteins and fats and the mechanics of being feeding your body and I think if you can adjust it to make it tastier than you should
salt butter cheese chocolate little snips to help
I think you should understand that most things in this world are neutral. Embracing neutral aids are good, so, neutral positive.
I think you should accept the weight of your feelings and scribble and draw and yell and sing and cry and howl and then sit and rest and watch a movie or listen to a song or read a book or read a blog or read a story and allow the cold comfort of the anger and angst
and think the weight of the unfair and cruel burning in you powering the furnace should be allowed a winter's night's chill
and then allowed to quiet as the sun rises again
funny, that, the sun, it rises on days of horror and days of sublime
i think you should wear the brace, actually, because your wrist hurts, and it is a brace, it is metal and fabric and velcro so some kind of plastic
it is not a crime, that you got away with, that haunts your steps, will they catch you, wearing the brace, you've lived twenty years since needing a brace, you're sure to be caught now, sheriff on your heels, the law just around the corner, everything bound to be ruined, soon as they find out
i think you should wear the brace because it is a brace and it will lessen the pain and you are in pain
and
justification is not needed
this is reason
alone
i think i should say that again
justification
is not needed
this is reason
and it alone
is more than enough
i think you should wear the comfortable clothes and you should wrap tight the comfortable blanket and open the windows to let in the comfortable air and i think that you should take a measuring cup and figure out if a few hours of sleep or gaming or reading or art or just being alive quietly would help you and if it does then dip the cup into the pool of time and i think you should drink it, allow it to settle, and experience it
i think you should experience softness
as often
as possible
i think if the pre-sliced single orange costs as much as the bag of oranges but the pre-sliced single orange allows you to dig your teeth into this freshness, this preserved sunshine
then the monetary cost is the cheapest price on this earth
i think you should wear the brace
and embrace the neutrality of things
i think you should be comfortable
i hope you are comfortable
i hope as i pass i can run a single finger along the length of your arm to remind you i hope you are comfortable
a while ago I read this sci-fi short story from the 50s where a guy is kidnapped and interrogated by aliens using a very sophisticated lie detector, but he realizes that the lie detector works off technical truth, and with some careful phrasing and misdirection, he manages to make them believe that humans are a race of immortal, overpowered, omniscient telepathic beings. and it works.
my favorite part is when he tells them that humans are "capable of transportation without the aid of spaceships or any vehicles, just by using mental power to control physical matter". it's true, we can. it's called walking.
okay I found it, it's The Best Policy by Randall Garrett
and it has other gems such as "I know beyond a shadow of a doubt what every member of my race thinks of you" (they don't know you exist) and "every human knows exactly as much about the location of your home planet as I do" (nothing)
hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.
For my own future reference, and for anyone else who wants it, a list of authors mentioned in the notes. (I cannot promise this is comprehensive, there are a lot of reblogs and I might have missed some.) I've included a link for each author, where possible I've tried to find one that leads you to their books, prioritising own websites/publishers, falling back on wikipedia otherwise.
If you find any mistakes in the links let me know and I'll edit. This post will be in two parts, because I literally broke tumblr with how many authors there were. I think it's about a hundred and fifty.
Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé - speculative fiction
Marguerite Abouet - graphic novels
Elizabeth Acevedo - fiction, poetry
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - fiction
Tomi Adeyemi - young adult fantasy
K Ancrum - speculative contemporary young adult
Lily Anderson - fiction
Ashley Antoinette - fiction
Ama Ata Aidoo - poetry, fiction, plays
Kemi Ashing Giwa - speculative fiction
Kalynn Bayron - young adult, fantasy
Malorie Blackman - childrens' books, young adult
Natasha Bowen - fantasy
Gwendolyn Brooks - poetry
Natasha Brown - fiction
NoViolet Bulawayo - fiction
Constance Burris - speculative fiction
CL Clark - fantasy, speculative fiction
Wahida Clark - urban fiction
Lucille Clifton - poetry, fiction
Alyssa Cole - romance, thrillers, graphic novels
Kamilah Cole - fiction
Claire Coleman - fiction, essays, poetry
Maryse Condé - fiction, non-fiction, plays
Emma Dabiri - non-fiction
Edwidge Danticat - fiction
Angela Davis - philosophy
Carolina Maria De Jesus - memoir
Hayley Dennings - fiction
Tracy Deonn - fiction
Nicky Drayden - speculative fiction
Tananarive Due - horror, comics
Camille Dungy - memoir, poetry
Esi Edugyan - fiction
Zetta Elliot - childrens' books, teen fiction, adult fiction
Petals Kalulé - fiction, poetry [Petals is noted as using she/they, I'm not 100% sure of their gender identity and past a certain point it feels weird to investigate too much]
The Witch of Stolen Tomorrows had begun to notice an odd trend amongst her petitioners.
The latest was a farmer. He had braved the journey through the Testing Woods and arrived with his convictions mostly intact. He now sat on a tree stump by the Witch’s thornbush cottage, drinking a cup of bitter tea, and asking for a fairly standard boon.
"Oh yes," said the Witch, "I can make you a spell for a bountiful harvest, but what will you give me in return?"
The farmer gulped. "My firstborn child?"
"By the dick-shattered sky.” The Witch exclaimed. “What?"
"Oh. You don't take firstborn children?"
"I am a witch of ancient promises, timeless dreams, and fresh blood.” The Witch announced. “Of course I take firstborn children. It's just a bit weird that it was your first offer."
"I'm sorry, mistress. I don't know how this works. Was I supposed to start smaller and work my way up to the firstborn? I’ve always been hopeless at haggling." The man seemed on the verge of tears. "My wife passed a few years ago. She used to do all the business at market."
"If your wife passed a few years ago, how exactly do you plan to offer me your firstborn?" The witch swirled her tea and the steam made foul omens in the air. "I mean, sure, you don't have to be married to have kids, but it does usually help if you're not obviously still in mourning."
"Oh, my little Jackie is already born. They're five. My firstborn and, well, my only-born."
"Okay. If the kid has already been born, you don't have to say firstborn. You can just say 'my child, whose name is...' What's the kid's name again?"
“Jackie.”
“Well, you’ve gone and put Jackie in a bit of a precarious spot. You see, now that you’ve offered the child, the fatespring will hate it if I accept a lesser deal. So either I have to talk you into a bargain that’s technically worse for you, or little Jackie comes to live with me. Now, I could-”
“That’s fine mistress. I accept the bargain.” The man sniffled and wiped his tears. He looked weirdly relieved. “So, do I bring Jackie here to you, or will you come to the farm to collect? Or is it one of those ‘leave them in a clearing at the full moon’ kind of-”
“My guy. What is up? What is your deal, exactly? I’ve had, like, five different firstborn deals this week. That’s weird, right? You get that? That’s normally the worst case scenario for y’all. But at least they hadn’t had the kids yet, so they could still fool themselves that they could wriggle out of the compact somehow. And they didn’t lead with ‘oh yeah, take my first child, that’s a strong opening bargaining position!” The canopy around them began to darken and the trees began to grow thorns. “And if there’s one thing that really gets on my flat-ass witch tits, it’s when there’s something going on I don’t understand. So what in the ever-boiling piss is up?”
The trembling farmer forced out the words, “It’s, uh, it’s the levy, mistress.”
“The levy? What levy?”
“The king, mistress. He’s put a levy out. He needs troops.”
“Why would he want a child to be pressed into military service?”
“It’s the prophecy, mistress. A great foretelling came down from the Speaker of the Fates, or so the criers say. In 18 years, a great darkness will come. It will bring war and ruin to the kingdom. It will shatter the crown. So the king is demanding we send every child who’ll be over 16 when the omens come due. They’ll get raised as warriors and heroes, so they say.” The farmer looked up at the Witch, a hint of hope shining through the desperation that had cracked him. “Only, none of us want to pay the king’s fateprice with our kids. And Mrs Goodwhistle, she said that you’d probably give them a good life.
“Or, at least… you’d give them some kind of life.”
The Witch said nothing for a long while.
Then she stood up.
“I guess I’d better get a shift on then.” The briar-bound cottage behind them pricked up its leaves like they were ears.
“You’re… you’re leaving?”
“Oh, don’t fret. I’ll take little Jackie with me. I’ll take all of them.” The witch’s home unravelled, all its branches and brambles writhing down to follow its roots into the ground. “If my hearth is going to become a daycare for all the poor little prophecy-pocked bairns of this land, I’m going to need more space. And I’ll need to take them somewhere harder to find…”
“Oh, thank you, mistress!”
The Witch flicked something to the farmer, who caught it instinctively. In his sweaty palm was a seed - though it was older, darker and heavier than normal.
“There’s your harvest spell. Appropriate payment, as the scalekeepers demand. Each morning, when you go to bring in the harvest - look to the sky. When the sun is just tickling the horizon, reap a single ear of corn and put it aside. Whisper into it as if you’re talking to your child. Jackie will hear you. In the deepest part of winter, roast and eat that corn - then you’ll get your reply.”
“I… I have no words…” The farmer’s eyes and throat burned.
“No need for them. The deal must be made and the price must be paid.” The Witch held out a hand and a nearby tree bent its limbs down to meet her, offering a branch. “Now, I have much to prepare, so I will take my leave. The woods will see you home.”
And the witch took the living branch from the tree and sat upon it like a broom, then rose into the sky like a sunrise.
---
18 years later, the Witch of Stolen Tomorrows returned to the kingdom. The earth trembled as her thorned fortress - a living wilderness - bore her onwards on a thousand root-wrought feet.
Standing atop the briar parapets was the Witch’s cadre of apprentices. They were all teens and twenty-somethings, clad in the colours of autumn skies and wielding the instruments of fate.
The king, far away in his keep, felt a strange shiver through the gold of his crown. An echo of its coming shattering.
The Witch hung from a giant thorn like a sailor from a bowsprit. In her free hand, she cradled a cup of tea.
“Here is a lesson about prophecies.” She said it softly, but the rushing winds carried the words to her students. “If you fight them, they’ll put you on like a jacket and wear you as a costume as they dance ruin through your life. But if you grab them by the scruff, then you can be the one wearing destiny as your cloak.
“And then you get to be the one writing the story.”
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The first time, she says "To me," and the mirror dutifully shows her her reflection. And she is pleased.
The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.
The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.
The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.
The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.
The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity
"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.
"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.
"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.
The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.
It is a different person each time, and they are all beautiful.
Years before the covid pandemic began, author Naomi Kritzer wrote the charming, emotionally genuine short story "So Much Cooking," which was a pandemic log through the eyes of a cooking blog. The premise is that the author is a home cooking blogger raising her kids, and then a pandemic hits--and bit by bit she's feeding not only her own, but her sister's kids, some neighbors' kids, and so on, in a situation of pandemic lockdown and food shortages.
It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.
Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.
I recommend both stories. They're uplifting in a way that a lot of what I see lately isn't. They're a bit of a panacea for constant fearmongering about intracommunity violence and grinding hatefulness. We can be good to each other, if we try.
People who comment on my website may find themselves receiving fae gifts, as a reward for making me do little happy dances because someone liked my weird little stories enough to tell me how it made them feel.
I cannot guarantee anything about the nature of the gifts, when you may receive them, or if you will actually receive anything.
Just know that if you feel you have received a gift after commenting something delightful on my site, you should probably make sure you have used it up before midnight (where applicable) and not tell anyone about it. Except me, you can tell me, and I will grin wryly with the knowledge of your reward.
Unless your gift turns out to be teeth. Then you should bury them immediately. You don't wanna know what happens otherwise, trust me.
Thanks, commenters, you all make my shrivelled little heart burn a little brighter!
“we didn’t know any better,” the crewman says, and swallows, presenting the chest to the captain. “what do we do now?”
“kill it,” the captain says, but the ice is melting in his eyes.
“we can’t,” the first mate says desperately, praying she won’t have to fight her captain on this. “we can’t. we - i won’t. we won’t.”
“i know.”
x
“daddy,” she says, floating in a tub of seawater in the hold, “daddy, la-la, la-la-la.”
her voice rings like bells. her accent is strange; her mouth isn’t made for human words. it mesmerises even the hardiest amongst them and she wasn’t even trying. the crew has taken to diving for shellfish near the shorelines for her; she loves them, splitting the shells apart with strength seen in no human toddler, slurping down the slimy molluscs inside and laughing, all plump brown cheeks and needle-sharp teeth. she sometimes splashes them for fun with her smooth, rubbery brown tail. even when they get soaked they laugh. they love her.
“daddy,” she calls again, and he can hear the worry in her voice. the storm rocking the ship is harsh and uncaring, and if they go down, she would be the only survivor.
“don’t worry,” he says, and goes over, sitting next to the tub. the first mate, leaning against the wall, pretends not to notice as he quietly begins to sing.
x
“father,” she says, one day, as she leans on the edge of the dock and the captain sits next to her, “why am I here?”
“your mother abandoned you,” he says, as he always has. “we found you adrift, and couldn’t bear to leave you there.”
she picks at the salt-soaked boards, uncertain. her hair is pulled back in a fluffy black puff, the white linen holding it slipping almost over one of her dark eyes. one of her first tattoos, a many-limbed kraken, curls over her right shoulder and down her arm, delicate tendrils wrapped around her calloused fingertips. “alright,” she says.
x
“why am I really here?” she asks the first mate, watching the sun set over the water in streaks of liquid metal that pooled in the troughs of the waves and glittered on the seafoam.
“we didn’t know any better,” the first mate says, staring into the water. “we didn’t know- we didn’t know anything. we didn’t understand why she fought so viciously to guard her treasure. we could not know she protected something a thousand times more precious than the purest gold.”
she wants to be furious, but she can’t. she already knew the answer, from reading the guilt in her father’s eyes and the empty space in her own history. and she can’t hate her family.
“it’s alright,” she says. “i do have a family, anyways. i don’t think i would have liked my other life near as much.”
x
her kraken grows, spreading its tendrils over her torso and arms. she grows too, too large to come on board the ship without being hauled up in a boat from the water. she sings when the storms come and swims before the ship to guide it to safety. she fights off more than one beast of the seas, and gathers a set of scars across her back that she bears with pride. “i don’t mind,” she says, when the captain fusses over her, “now i match all of you.”
the first time their ship is threatened, really threatened, is by another fleet. a friend turned enemy of the first mate. “we shouldn’t fight him,” she says, peering through the spyglass.
“why not?” the mermaid asks.
“he’ll win,” the first mate says.
the mermaid tips her head sideways. Her eyes, dark as the deep waters, gleam in the noon light. “are you sure?” she asks.
x
the enemy fleet surrenders after the flagship is sunk in the night, the anchor ripped off the ship and the planks torn off the hull. the surviving crew, wild-eyed and delirious, whimper and say a sea serpent came from the water and attacked them, say it was longer than the boat and crushed it in its coils. the first mate hears this and has to hide her laughter. the captain apologizes to his daughter for doubting her.
“don’t worry,” she says, with a bright laugh, “it was fun.”
x
the second time, they are pushed by a storm into a royal fleet. they can’t possibly fight them, and they don’t have the time to escape.
“let me up,” the mermaid urges, surfacing starboard and shouting to the crew. “bring me up, quickly, quickly.”
they lower the boat and she piles her sinous form into it, and uses her claws to help the crew pull her up. once on the deck she flops out of the boat and makes her way over to the bow. the crew tries to help but she’s so heavy they can barely lift parts of her.
she crawls up out in front of the rail and wraps her long webbed tail around the prow. the figurehead has served them well so far but they need more right now. she wraps herself around the figurehead and raises her body up into the wind takes a breath of the stinging salt air and sings.
the storm carries her voice on its front to the royal navy. they are enchanted, so stunned by her song that they drop the rigging ropes and let the tillers drift. the pirates sail through the center of the fleet, trailing the storm behind them, and by the time the fleet has managed to regain its senses they are buried in wind and rain and the pirates are gone.
x
she declines guns. instead she carries a harpoon and its launcher, and uses them to board enemy ships, hauling her massive form out of the water to coil on the deck and dispatch enemies with ruthless efficiency. her family is feared across all the sea.
x
“you know we are dying,” the captain says, looking down at her.
she floats next to the ship, so massive she could hold it in her arms. her eyes are wise.
“i know,” she says, “i can feel it coming.”
the first mate stands next to the captain. she never had a lover or a child, and neither did he, but to the mermaid they are her parents. she will always love her daughter. the tattoos are graven in dark swirls across the mermaid’s deep brown skin and the flesh of her tail, even spiraling onto the spiked webbing on her spine and face. her hair is still tied back, this time with a sail that could not be patched one last time.
“we love you,” the first mate says simply, looking down. her own tightly coiled black hair falls in to her face; she shakes the locs out of the way and smiles through her tears. the captain pretends he isnt crying either.
“i love you too,” the mermaid says, and reached up to pull the ship down just a bit, just to hold them one last time.
“guard the ship,” the captain says. “you always have but you know they’re lost without you.”
“without you,” the mermaid corrects, with a shrug that makes waves. “what will we do?”
“i don’t know,” the captain says. “but you’ll help them, won’t you?”
“of course i will,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “i will always protect my family.”
x
the captain and the first mate are gone. the ship has a new captain, young and fearless - of the things she can afford to disregard. she fears and loves the ocean, as all captains do. she does not fear the royal fleet. and she does not fear the mermaid.
“you know, i heard stories about you when i was a little girl,” she says, trailing her fingers in the water next to the dock.
the mermaid stares at her with one eye the size of a dinner table. “is that so?” she hums, smirking with teeth sharper than the swords of the entire navy.
“they said you could sink an entire fleet and that you had skin tougher than dragon scales,” the new captain says, grinning right back at the monster who could eat her without a moment’s hesitation. “i always thought they were telling tall tales.”
“and now?”
“they were right,” the new captain says. “how did they ever befriend you?”
the mermaid smiles, fully this time, her dark eyes gleaming under the white linen sail. “they didn’t know any better.”
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Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.
The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.
Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks. Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that? In the computer core, or the communications hub? You just lose power. And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.
If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.
It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost. Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.
Most fleets give you something, of course. For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass. I looked at the vial.
“It’s too soon,” Traav said.
Kvala gestured negation, shakily. She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now. Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive. “You know we’re losing the war.”
They couldn’t deny that. “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”
“Doesn’t it? The Chreee have better technology. Better resources. And they have their warrior code. They don’t care if they die.”
“We can’t give up!” Traav protested. They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told. “Any heartbeat now—”
There was a clunk. Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.
“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.
Kvala exchanged glances with me. The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors. What was the point, after all?
The Aushkune did.
There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here. They were supposed to hide in nebulas.
But if there were—
If there were, we were too late. The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—
Footsteps.
Bipedal. The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.
And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it. My first thought was, robot? That’s almost worse than Aushkune . . . But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.
Who wore suits?
“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala. “Urgent treatment. Evacuation.”
“Who are you?” Kvala struggled upright.
Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners. “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain. Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.
“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?” Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.
“Not Chreee,” the sound system said. “You Man. Soil Starship Nichols.” The being hesitated. “Rescue Chreee as well. On ship. Will separate.”
“You what?” I said faintly. Who would do that?
“Oath,” the being explained.
“What kind of oath? To what deity?”
The shoulders of the being moved up and down. “Several different. Also none. For me, none. Just—oath.”
I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was. I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.
The being scanned me. “Have water,” it said. “Recommend.”
Raithari have fast metabolisms. I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.
“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”
“Raithari to Raithar. Chreee to Chreeeholm.”
“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.
The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad. Sometimes lie.”
We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?
“And you—what?” I asked. “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”
The being seemed to consider this. “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.
Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense. Did it worship soil? But it had said that it had sworn to no deity . . .
Madness.
On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it. So why not embrace madness and see what happened?
“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
Punching God simply seemed like the only reasonable response.
I had closed my eyes for the last time, then opened them again to see the big bearded bastard standing there, looking all beneficent and peaceful, smiling like he expected me to be happy about being dead. Just chilling out in front of those huge, obnoxiously ostentatious pearly gates.
So, of course, I punched the smug fucker. I balled up my fists, walked up to him without saying a word, and as he spread his arms in what I think was meant to be a paternal gesture of acceptance, I knocked him right on his holy arse with one solid right hook.
Lying there, holding his jaw, he didn't even look surprised. He just stared up at me, while I shook with rage, sweat beading on my head, which was still bald even here in the afterlife.
"You absolutely atrocious piece of shit," I snarled at his white-robed form, spitting the curses like they would cut him.
"You sadistic, cruel, vicious arsehole," I growled, standing over him still wearing my hospital gown. I could feel the spaces in my flesh where the cannula had been. There was a ghostly sensation of monitors that had been attached to my skin since forever ago, but were now suddenly absent.
I glared at him, eyes blasting rage from beneath an absence of eyebrows. But I wasn't really seeing the ambivalent, bearded face. Instead, her face was burning bright in my mind. Her lovely, loving, youthful face stained with tears I once thought she would run out of, but that hadn't stopped even after however long it had been. Every visit, there had been more tears, and I knew there would be more, so many more, now that I was gone.
God didn't try to get up. He didn't try to argue, or protest. Something in his eyes seemed to accept this. It was almost like he expected it. He stopped rubbing his jaw, looking up at me with a horribly agreeable expression.
"I forgive you," he said, his voice reverberating deep and resonant, like gentle thunder.
"Fuck you, you rotten cunt," I snapped back, pulling back a bare foot and kicking him in the guts with a satisfying thud. I did it again, and again, not stopping until my foot ached from the impacts. He had curled up into a defensive ball by that point, and I took a step back, breathing hard.
As my breath slowed, feeling my lungs working in a way they hadn't for years, I heard a strange sound behind me. Something like a drain emptying, or mud sucking on a shoe as you pull it out of a bog. Turning, I saw a massive hole in the blank white ground. A black abyss, several meters wide, filled at first with nothing but absolute darkness. Then, as I watched, eyes fixed on this perfectly circular hole carved in the smooth floor, a flicker of light began to dance in the bottom of it.
"Please, don't go," came God's voice from behind me. It was softer than before, gently pleading, a protective note at the edges. The resonance, the depth, the authority were still there - but there was something else underneath them that felt oddly wrong. It was so confusing that I thought for a moment it couldn't be him. I turned to face him again, and found him standing on the spot where I had left him curled into a ball, looking just as disgustingly peaceful as before.
"You don't get to ask anything of me, you shitstain," I told him, my brief curiosity fleeing at the sight of his beatific features. "You don't get to ask for anything more from me," I declared, blood boiling as I stepped towards him once more, my fists two burning orbs of rage.
"It's ok now, it's all over, you can rest," he tried to reassure me, voice full of that supernatural authority that I couldn't trust, with a kindness that felt awfully practiced. He raised his hands in a somewhat awkward attempt at a calming gesture.
I stopped. I stopped and stared at him incredulously. I could rest? I could fucking rest?
I looked down at my hospital gown. At the marks on my arms. At the lines that showed the traces of every dose of chemo, every drop of morphine that I had to lower the dosage of every time my family visited, just so I could be something like lucid.
"I don't want to fucking rest, you turd," I growled, eyes snapping back up to glare daggers into that wrinkled face and benevolent expression. "I want to rip your damned legs off and beat you to death with them," I shouted, voice cracking from my bubbling emotions. I moved towards him again, fingers flexing as a part of me wondered if God could bleed.
He held out his arms as though to keep me away, but I batted them aside and smashed my fist into his nose. I wasn't sure if the crunch came from him or my knuckles, but I didn't care. He didn't go down this time, only stumbled back a little. So I grabbed his stupid robe and pulled us together again, bringing his face back into hard contact with my fist. I could feel my face contorting into a bestial snarl, punching him over and over again, until I felt a wave of rage and horror and despair tear itself free from my aching chest, and I let out a scream like nothing I'd ever heard before.
It felt like my throat ripped asunder as I cried out, releasing my grip and dropping to my knees, tears flowing down my face as all that I had held onto for so long finally overcame me. There, at the gates of heaven, I wept like I had never wept in all my life.
I don't know how long I sobbed for.
When I breathed in deep, sucking up all those feelings and drawing myself back together, ragged and worn though every edge of me was, I felt his hand resting gently on my shoulder.
"It's ok now," he said, soft and kind once again. Like he understood. As though he could ever possibly understand.
I shook him off my shoulder and stood up. I stumbled forward at first, but I managed it on the second try. I wasn't used to using my legs any more, and that initial surge of rage had subsided into something that couldn't quite keep me from noticing how my body felt ill-fitting.
"It's never going to be ok again, you flaccid prick," I told him, the embers of my rage still burning behind my reddened eyes. "It will never be ok for her ever, ever again. How the fuck can you say that? How the absolute shit can you have the gall to tell me it's ok, when she had to watch her mother die when she was just twelve years old? When she had to watch me fucking waste away in agony, she had to watch me become a little less myself with every visit, while she tried to go school and do well on unending exams, and deal with everything else kids have to fucking deal with already?"
I felt tears still running down my cheeks, but slower now. My eyes were sore. I couldn't look at him any more. I couldn't look at the lie of his compassionate face for even a second longer. So I turned and looked down at the yawning chasm in the floor again.
A warm light flickered there in the darkness, and I walked with unsteady steps to the edge of it. I lowered myself onto my knees and looked down, peering past the brilliant whiteness of this place into a very different space.
The light was flickering fire. Looking straight down I could see a dry, rocky road extending away from me, leading to a huge pair of iron gates that stood wide open. They didn't look like they could even close any more, they were so rusted. It was clear no-one was spending their time making sure the gates could keep anyone in, or out.
Beyond them, the darkness ended. Warm light glowed from fires that burned everywhere. Huge bonfires, little campfires, massive blazes in the distance that I couldn't see the source of. And all around them, were people.
People huddled around each pyre, in great crowds. They were indistinct, as was the sound of them that reached my ears. There were so many I couldn't possibly count, gathered in groups and wandering between them in ones and twos. So, so many people. Huddled around for warmth and comfort, collected in crowds that moved gently back and forth like a glittering ocean.
"Please, don't. You don't have to. I forgive you," came that gentle voice me from behind me, rising above the growing din of conversation that spilled up out of the hole.
With a sudden flash of revelation, I realised what I had missed in his voice. I realised what note I hadn't registered through the fog of my anger.
He was scared.
I turned to look over my shoulders, and scanned his face. I looked hard at the lines that creased there, and he seemed to realise I had seen something different in them. Something about him changed. Maybe it was how he was standing, or a little detail of his expression I couldn't put my finger on, but there was something desperate about God.
I looked past him, eyes narrowing. I looked again at the pearly gates of heaven, taking in the sight properly for the first time. I looked at the ornate details, the great banks of clouds on either side. I looked at how they were very firmly closed.
I looked past them. Past the vertical bars wrapped in golden filigrees, up to the rolling hills, the green pastures, the white lights shining from the brilliant blue sky.
I saw what wasn't there. Not one person. Not a single one.
"Won't you forgive me, too?" he asked, his voice tiny, pleading. There he was, all alone, the little man who made it all, begging for someone to forgive him. To forgive him for everything. Literally, for every single thing.
I took a deep breath.
"Go fuck yourself, shithead," I said, as I pushed myself forward into the darkness, towards the constellations of campfires, and all the people who came before me.
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