OFCARNVGE

I'm very guilty of being away for long periods of time, but you are always so patient with me x

Very long story shortish - I went through a medication change which made me really quite unwell. Everything has been put back as it was and I'm slightly better than I was, but far from level.

Its hard to express the profoundness of what happened here. I don't think I've ever had a mental health/psychological experience like it, and I feel like I am trying to find myself again.

It was like someone took my mind, like a vase, smashed it against a wall, and I am now painstakingly trying to put it back together. I am quite scared that I might not be able to.

I have people around me and I am safe, but I wanted to explain

I've been writing on tumblr for in excess of 12 years, and for most of that time I've been lucky to be writing a world with one other person who loves the art as much as me.

So much has happened in my life in that 12 years - and so much is happening in the outside world. It's often turbulent and too much, and I have long times where I cant post.

But I've never left. I love this place. It's like a door that exists in every house I've ever lived in, and I'm so grateful.

@annalis-e--shadowofpanem

continued from here x

People, questions, hands. Molly took a long moment to reorient. Someone was taking her blood pressure. She sat up. Apart from her ribs, which were already blooming a vivid blue, she felt fine – dazed but fine.

Reaching down, her hand came back to her face with red dust on it. She closed her fingers almost instinctually, as if she were trying to ascertain if it was real. It was. Despite the whirl she was in she knew she’d done something…unusual. Impossible. But she’d done it.

Even as people flocked to her to check her vitals, and Pan was at her side, Molly felt a strange door creak open inside her, a possibility - like a piece of information that is impossible to unknow once it’s been discovered; what if you could go back?

The pain in her side pushed reality back into focus, and Pan’s face. Her fiancé looked frightened. Molly didn’t know what to do but hold onto her as tight as she could, like an anchor. For several minutes she didn’t speak, until they were more or less alone.

“Since…Reach, I’ve been trying to find Grace. The way I can find Bowen, and Jiayi.” She spoke quietly, it felt like a confession. “I’ve been trying, I can’t find her. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I got lost.”

-

Mallory’s eyes combed the interior of the state of the art aircraft. Partly because it was the most advanced piece of military machinery she’d ever seen, and partly to avoid Amaterasu’s eyeline. The back of her neck burned. She turned the St Christopher medallion she’d been gifted over and over in her fingers before tucking it into a pocket. She didn’t dare touch her phone. She felt that everything she told Milo, especially now, just posed a hazard to him.

Her mind reeled back to the face that had sprung up out of her laptop screen, a woman in a gloomy cell unravelling the story of London.

But it wasn’t the end of the story, and the feeling that that face in the dark was just another cog, a victim, lodged inside her uncomfortably. The plane made remarkably little noise. More than ever Mallory could feel herself striding out of her depth. Falsterbo looked utterly prosaic in almost any picture she could find; a spit of land by the sea with little pastel houses on it. And yet these people had managed to hide something truly strange there. She glanced sideways at the woman whose face had brought her collectively several thousand miles.

Something involuntary happened whenever she did this; a flush that went up her neck and down her back between her shoulder blades. It was a new thing, and Mallory could feel it increasingly separating her from her rational decision making.

Mallory screwed her courage to the sticking place. Her voice left her uncomfortably.

“I know this is a recon, and I’m not going to do anything stupid.” She made herself meet Amaterasu’s gaze. “But do we have an approach if our hosts start making different decisions? What if they’re the non-rational actors in this?”

-

Floss had needed to drink something for two hours. When she blinked her eyes hurt, but she wouldn’t tear them away from the monitor. Since the advent of effective gene sequencing technologies scientists had been compiling databases of pathology markers. The general medical community’s interest clustered around cancers, hereditary disorders, heart disease.

It was like trying to read a road map, when what you needed to know was where the rivers were. Floss slumped back in her chair, sat there obstinately for a moment, then all but forced herself to the kitchen.

She stood absentmindedly staring while the kettle burbled. It was getting dark outside. The scientist was usually good at being alone, in fact it was when she did her best work. But now she felt the quiet in the house. The absences that had been left by the people she loved pressed on her. The thought snagged in her mind as she picked up the teacup; people I love. A few years ago she would have been hard pressed even to think those words, and much poorer for it.

The tea had over-brewed in her distraction, she didn’t mind it. Fiona hadn’t called. Not for nearly a week. Floss had had a few check in messages from Maryellen, Fiona’s nurse, so there was nothing wrong. But still the phone calls became thinner. And what could Floss argue? Things had been happening, the house had hosted a delegation spanning a number of worlds. But still.

She all but physically shook herself and carried the tea back down to the basement. There was an email notification in the corner of the screen. Her heart accelerated, maybe it was Amber with something. No, Deborah…The initial sigh of disappointment gave way to perplexity…and then a narrow stare of utter fascination.

“What on Earth…”

…or perhaps not. The scientist didn’t look away for a long time. Lux was locked down, and Deborah had taken a risk sending this. But Floss suspected it to be a well calculated one. Deborah likely knew that Floss was noted for her, at times, less than prudent curiosity.

The idea formed; Besides, she wasn’t going to Lux. She was getting on a plane to a place not too close, but not too far off. There were all sorts of research-based reasons for this. And should the embargo be lifted, well, she’d be nearby.

The tea went cold next to the monitor while Florence packed a bag. In her heels and trench coat she looked a little like the operative she’d been in the middle part of her life with the shadows; the hurried elegance which overlaid the threat.

She paused for just a moment in the hallway, and stole a glance back at the kitchen table. Where she’d felt a ghost sitting a few nights previous. That ghost which explained Fiona’s silence.

@annalis-e--shadowofpanem

Continued from here x

The pieces scattered. Mallory climbed into the back of a plane she wouldn’t have believed existed till she saw it. Molly took one look back as she boarded her own transport. It had been a strange, isolated kind of safety being tucked under Floss’ wing; running supplies for the worst affected by the London disaster, the very immediate and understandable mission of bringing food and medicine to people who needed it.

A single world could not have changed more in a handful of days. The doors of the plane locked in position. Within, it was almost eerily quiet. England began to peel away beneath. It’s fields and roads giving way to ocean.

Molly had only packed one bag, nothing but essentials. Considering this was a delegation between worlds she had not elected for formality; a pair of fitted cargo pants and a light blue blouse hung on her frame. Practicality was her mindset, and she went toward this shoreline with a single-minded purpose. The woman in those images had become a fixation, a goal. She could be that way. It was this kind of strength and stubbornness that had brought her through the worst days of her life. Her eyelids dipped, and she looked down at her boots where she sat in the rear of the cockpit…In her mind’s eye she saw the closet lightbulb shattering, years ago, in her mother’s house…And perhaps it was just that same mindset that had cost her as well.

She couldn’t touch Grace with Reach.

The thought finally formed fully. Her unconscious mind had been skirting around it, like a pit in her psyche, but now she saw it; her Reach could skate back and forth, in and out of time and place. People who did not yet exist, her children, and people long dead many worlds away were as real as her own hands. But she couldn’t find her sister. And in that realisation came again that terrible feeling of not truly being forgiven. In the evenings before sleep, she had taken to doing the experiment. Of slipping away from the dinners and gatherings which had become the centre of the Upton Residence.

Molly’s hair had grown back while she’d been in Cambridge, it hung long and strawberry blonde in front of her face. Absent mindedly, eyes still fixed to the floor she pulled it into her two familiar pigtails, then glanced up at the back of Leslie’s head in the cockpit. She couldn’t see Pan. Just out of habit Molly pressed into her heels and let her Reach stretch out for Grace.

“How long till we get to Lux?”

No reply. Molly tilted her head.

“Leslie, you ok?”

To the left of the pilot’s seat a hand clasped a control stick and conducted a complex set of moves. With a creeping feeling of terror Molly watched; Leslie didn’t wear rings like that, three ornate silver rings on a pale hand.

Molly leapt up and banged her head, the bulkhead was lower than she remembered – scrabbling backward as the person in the front of the plane released a seat buckle and turned to look at her.

The look of shock on the other woman’s face was a mirror. She was blonde, but not like Leslie, her hair was almost completely white, long. Her features were sharp, beautiful and strange. She was dressed in a taupe flight suit, rolled at the ankles and wrists. Heavy boots. Molly looked down for her bag, as if it contained some means of defence but it wasn’t there. The woman at the front of the plane extended a hand, as one would to a scared animal. She looked increasingly amazed.

Like she was trying to shove her way out of a lucid dream Molly grit her teeth and clenched her eyes shut.

Freefall. Spinning. Then an impact. Molly rolled onto her side, groaning. Her eyes squinted open and the glare of mid-day sunlight lanced at her, dust blew across her face. When she rolled onto her side to push herself up, her hands found red desert sand.

Voices. Molly glanced around. It was a sandy shrubland. Her ribs hurt. There were people running toward her, what they were saying she couldn’t make out, but there were two of them. They wore light clothing and cotton scarves over their heads. The man stopped about ten feet away, looking at the woman on the ground with amazement. Reflexively Molly scrabbled backward. He dropped the shovel and raised his hands, to show they were empty.

The headscarf that had been coiled around the woman’s hair unfurled as she ran and was snatched by the wind. Molly watched it hypnotically until the woman staggered to a stop only a few feet away.

She spoke.

Molly frowned and shook her head. She didn’t know the language. Had she fallen out of the plane?

They were talking between each other, looking at her. But it was like they were both terrified to get closer.

“Who are you?” The words were barely a whisper, Molly was still winded.

They both stopped speaking sharply.

The man clasped his hands to his mouth. The woman, knelt only a few feet away, dropped to her knees. She clenched her fingers into anxious fists near her face, as if she were trying very hard to think of something – quickly. When she unraveled them, Molly saw that her palms were calloused. Her hands extended cautiously, not daring to touch the blonde woman who had fallen from the sky.

Her accent was like none Molly had ever heard, but she understood the words.

“You cannot be here, we need to- “

“Mum!!”

Molly blinked.

She was sat on the side of a bed, in a large bedroom with floorboards and forest green walls. Outside the window it was raining softly. It took her a strangely long moment to notice the teenager who was sat on the floor in front of her.  

She frowned.

“Bowen? Bowen what’s the matter sweetheart?”

Her daughter looked terrified, or angry, or perhaps both. The teenager shook her head.

“You keep doing this! You go away! What are you looking for!?”

Molly’s mouth fell open, she reached up to brush her hair away from her face to find it was shorter, falling just above her shoulder. A full-length mirror to the left of the bed saw a woman in a linen dress and beautiful bracelets. A woman almost precisely sixteen years older than she remembered. She looked back down toward her daughter, but the teenager had already pushed herself to her feet and was striding away across the room.

“Bowen, Bowen wait I’m so sorr-“

The bedroom door slammed. Freefall. Grandfather clock striking in a hallway. A painting on the wall in a darkened bedroom. Lightning flash. An impassible wall of light. Shards of lightbulb glass, sparks and then…stars? Gentle motes of beautiful light drifting in in an expanse of night. The sense of being watched, or seen.

Aboard the Eboncry the people in the cockpit saw Molly Reass turn her head toward them,  open her mouth to speak, and then vanish. The event would register on the planes instruments as a short, but scrambling burst of signals lasting about three seconds.

She was gone for a little over a minute.

When she returned, blinking strangely into reality with a displacement of air, the signal burst again momentarily scrambled the instruments, and Molly was on the floor in the midst of a seizure that lasted three minutes. When she awoke, she was clinging on so hard to whoever had come to her that her knuckles were bone white, but she was awake and mostly unharmed.

Beginning of records, the Druids, the first people to Inhabit Sruth utilise the innate Reach giving properties of the world imbued to them by Heartstone, a mineral found throughout Sruth. The origin of Heartstone is not known. Or is it…

See Heartstone / Reach

The Druids detect a cataclysm thousands of years in the future, and deploy an artefact designed to arrive on Earth at the correct time, with instructions for one known and calculated method of negating the cataclysm. Their intent being to transpose one person from present Earth onto Sruth in the reign of Kulani Kerai, utilising Reach based technology (Heartstone nexus).

See Miriz / Sruthan Rosetta / Heartstone Nexus

Over centuries, and as the planet is industrialised the druids dwindle and the remains of their heirs become The Seers, who also serve as a monarchy. The current Seer, Kerai, is a powerful user of Reach and is aware of an approaching disaster, but not it's nature. Her position in time and power were factors considered by the druids in selecting her for intervention

See Kulani Kerai

A civil war begins to boil up between the followers of the Seers, and the industrialised Drey City, led by Bairre Vardan. Bairre Vardan is a firm believer that Reach is a poison to human free will, and seeks rid the planet of heart stone. If his plan should come to fruition, he would sell the mineral to a number of worlds and weaponisation would occur resulting in the cataclysm that would destroy many worlds

See Drey City / Bairre Vardan

It's strange to be a fiction writer when the world is in such a way, I worry that somehow I'm not paying enough attention. But then I remind myself that every dire moment in history still had storytellers.

The UK is a trash fire - but it's a fairly slow burning one with relatively few guns involved. I feel heartsore at the state of things.

But this morning I woke to the sound of megaphones down in the street, there was a march for Palestine going through the city.

@annalis-e--shadowofpanem

Continued from here x

Early. Mallory had slept barely three hours, but she didn’t feel it. She was one of those people who could burn through a couple of days without sleep. She got up, pulled on some clothes and paced the halls. It was eerily quiet in the Upton residence. The kitchen which had been the center of the world sat darkened and slumbering. There was the sound of keyboard keys clicking from the narrow flight of stairs which led down to the basement. The Texan approached curiously. When her foot touched down at the bottom, she glimpsed one of the older shadows sat at a work bench, eyes locked to a microscope.

“Hello Mallory.” She uttered quietly without looking up. She adjusted the glass slide she was peering at slightly.

“You’ve learned my footsteps already?”

“That’d be impressive, wouldn’t it? But the honest answer is more that I know the footsteps of everyone else in this house so well…that like so much in life and science…” The Englishwoman looked up from her work. “…It’s a process of elimination.”

Mallory nodded. Unthinkingly she reached into her pocket and closed her hand around her phone. “We’re flying out to this Tral Hus place today, anythin’ you can tell me about it?”

Florence rubbed her eyes. She hadn’t slept.

“Have you spoken to Go go?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I honestly don’t think I can do any better.”

“Where is Go go by the way?” Mallory glanced back over her shoulder, almost as if she expected to see the former bodyguard following her down the stairs.

Florence smiled knowingly. “I’m guessing by that, that whoever it is you keep in your phone has been asleep for the last six hours or so? The person who seems to know a lot of things?” Mallory braced, her fingers tightening.

The scientist waved her hand in a gesture of apology. “Force of habit, I read people. Go go left for the airport about two hours ago…and I’m actually quite glad that I get to be the one to tell you – your, albeit slightly crazy plan, actually paid off. O-ren met Beatrix in Celina Texas not long ago. They are both unharmed, and Bebe is reunited with her mother.”

Mallory’s mouth dropped open. She’d been so tied up chasing leads on London that Beatrix had momentarily vanished from her vision. She smiled. It felt good. It was hard to pin down – Mallory was not the best at internal examination, but her conscience lifted.

“No shit??”

Florence gave a tired laugh. “As it would happen, no shit.”

Mallory shook her head, still smiling. “Has Go go flown out to meet O-ren?”

Florence nodded. “That’s the general idea. Their movements beyond that are their own. But we’ll keep tabs on them. I feel certain we’ll hear from them soon either way.” Florence pulled the slide out from under the microscope and slid it back into a rack, pushing the rack back into a refrigerator unit. She tapped a few keys on the lab computer and a programme began whirring. Mallory stood slightly awkwardly a ways off.

“You seem, I don’t know…A little more understanding than the others? Sorta kinder?”

“There’s a fair number of people who would agree with you, and they’re dead.”

The reply crossed the basement like a shot. Mallory stood speechless.

Floss stood up. “That’s exactly the kind of assumption that’ll get you killed, especially walking into Agnes’ neck of the woods. You let her near you and you’ll be lucky if you have time to regret it.”

“That sounds like experiential data.”

Floss paused with her mouth open, brow furrowed. Mallory pinned her with a nervous but stubborn gaze.

“I read people too.”

The scientist folded her arms and the frown melted into a look a genuine appreciation.

“You’re right. And you’re not unintelligent, you’re not unexperienced. There is some talk that you have Shadow methods. I just don’t want you to be…dazzled by what you see, in any way. And whatever you do…” Floss paced across the basement till Mallory was in front of her. “Don’t get it into your head that you can take Agnes on, please. I’m asking you for your own sake and the sake of the people who are escorting you. They’re taking their own risks too.”

Mallory gave a slight but decisive nod. Floss sighed with relief.

“Are you religious Mallory?”

The Viper shook her head, slightly taken aback by the question. “Not really, my mom is. My dad and brother not so much.”

Florence reached into a half unpacked cardboard box.

“I’m much the same. But you know, I actually prayed last night, for the first time in a very long time, and it might have done me some good. And it made me think about…here it is…” Floss pulled a thin gold chain from the box; it bore a tiny gold medallion. She held it out to Mallory. The Viper took it cautiously, looking at Floss with a steepled brow.

“Are you planting a bug on me?”

“Only if you count the watchful eye of St. Christopher. It was my mothers. I never wore it, but I could never throw it away either. I think you need it more than me, you have a journey to undertake.”

Something twinged in Mallory’s chest, she’d never understood her mom’s faith. But then, she’d never really tried. She closed her hand around the simple piece of metal. Floss patted her shoulder.

“Maybe try and get a bit more rest? No doubt Amy will be up at the crack of dawn to usher you onto a plane.”

The scientist disappeared up the steps where Mallory heard the sound of a kettle boiling and tea being made. She tucked the gift into her phone case and returned to her room. Sleep wasn’t an option, so she checked and rechecked her bags. The outfits went into the suitcase. By the time Amy knocked in the door Mallory was all but standing right behind it.

And only then did she remember what she’d done the day before…and a little of the confidence she’d built up in her adrenaline and sleep deprivation crumbled under Amy’s gaze. For a horribly telling moment she felt naked, and she didn’t even know if she felt ashamed about it. She swallowed thickly.

“I’m ready. Let’s go.”

-

Molly touched Pan before the simple boundary of her skin made it there; swinging her feet onto the floor and extending a hand, her reach brushed up the back of Pan’s neck, as if she were cradling her head. And then her arms enfolded her, knelt on the quiet bedroom floor.

For a moment Molly wanted the same thing. An endless expanse of quiet mornings filled with nothing but sketched architectural drawings and breakfast and milkshakes. In a world a little way off O-ren was coming to visit, with the creases at the corners of her eyes full of age and laughter. And Eleanor would be there too. This was home, or it would be.

As best she could, Molly took the life she could feel the shape of and held it out reach-wise to Pan. She kissed the side of Pan’s neck.

“I want to, I want to, I want to.” She whispered it, then leaned back. Her eyes gleamed.

“But we gotta meet this thing first.” She smiled. “If I’d never made the leap and run barefoot across what felt like half a state of forest I’d have never found you…Try not to think of it as a challenge, it’ll take a while, but we’re on our way to meet Bowen, and Jiayi.”

Molly stood up, and gently, but with a strength belied by her delicate frame, helped Pan to her feet.

-

Slowly, over the course of the morning and breakfast and last arrangements for travel, The Upton Residence emptied.

Floss didn’t hear the Eboncry depart, but she felt the brief thrum of the jet engines through the walls of the basement. And for about a half hour even after that she sat in the same position, fingers knitted together under her chin, reading and re-reading the DNA analysis that sat unyielding on the monitor. It hurt when she blinked. She petulantly reached down and hit the enter key again, as if refreshing the data might change it. It did not.

Her peers had departed for enormous, world changing tasks, the test tube rattling and computer readouts of an introvert scientist paled in comparison. But this was Floss’ mountain; and to her nothing mattered more in this moment.

It's a preliminary analysis, you don’t have a full sequencer.

Her intently rational mind coached her thus. Truth, perhaps. But she was good at what she did. She could see the pattern, the way an artist can pick out negative space. It stood there stark and perfect. It was hard to gauge if the results would be the same for the other Somnia, they each possessed distinct compounds, if only slightly, the sequence would be different.

Nonetheless, the fate tied to the blonde hair in the sample tube was definite.

Florence turned over the possibilities; this would be far from the first time The Shadows had utilised genetic techniques. Perhaps it was a mistake, an oversight? Once programmed perhaps the possibility of genetic reversal was simply never entertained, as such the ramifications would never have been discovered.

But a twitchy, paranoid little impulse at the back of Floss’ neck smelled design. It was just possible that whoever built this thing put a barb on the hook.

With a deep breath she collapsed the analysis window and pulled up her email. She began typing Deborah’s name into the recipient box. She stopped. Deleted it. She typed out a handle that had become an almost welcome interloper during Pan’s struggle with her pregnancy;

[Amber, look I know you’re busy with Koa and Paris but I need help, and I need it to go through a quiet channel.

Get rid of this as soon as you’ve read it and contact me however you like, have my microwave read it out to me via the LED display if you have to.

I need to know who wrote the Umbrae Somnia gene codes. The exact person, if they exist.

Please help, Floss]

Florence hit send and laced her fingers back together, resting them against her forehead with her elbows on the workbench, and in her head recited the part of the message she didn’t dare put through any network:

…Because I can take the coding out. Heck it wouldn’t even take that long, a couple of modified T cell infusions and voila.

And Leslie would be fine for a day, a week, a month. And then she’d start noticing that she couldn’t read so well, and then she couldn’t see colours, or shapes, or light. And then she’d be blind, utterly blind. Because the gene expression that has been altered and subsequently held in check by the Somnia sequence would cause complete deterioration of the optic nerves and optic chiasm.

I don’t think she’d ever fly a plane again.

She’s been through too much, we can’t do that to her.

O-ren is a problematic and fascinating character both within the frame and without. And Tarantino as a director is someone whose work I adore but I also struggle with. Probably whole media/critical theory texts could be dedicated to O-ren by much smarter people than me who understand history and representation, the intricacies of film and stereotypes and feminism.

All that said, I hope I've granted her a modicum of peace, I know writing her has done so for me.

...And now... gentle readers...the camera is zooming out, and there's a much bigger picture to start writing. We're talking universes big xxxx