The mirror-hole appears on Haley’s sixteenth birthday as she’s putting on eyeliner. A huge, jagged oval in the middle of the mirror.Haley shrugs and puts on mascara. It’s not like she’s never seen a mirror-hole. Still, she doesn’t let anything get close to it.She waits until Friday before telling Jessica, while they’re in line for […]
Beneath Ibryn’s touch, the Instrument that Has No Name sings. It is a complex affair—it took them several years to learn. Many more to master. Playing it is a puzzle, a complicated maze of levers and keys and dials only decipherable by the immense processing power of their hive. To even coax out a single […]
I push Alicia hard, deep into the liquid, gripping her shoulders when she squirms. Silver balls of air bubble from her nose and her lips move as if she’s trying to speak, to cry, to plead. Finally, she sags into the viscous liquid. Her eyes stay open, staring at the ceiling of Cargo Hold One, […]
Summoning an Eldritch horror is all about boundaries. This is no minor pantheon of darkness–demons, ghouls and small gods, hooved and hungry. No. These are horrors uninhabiting the cosmos, ouroboric infinity devouring itself.I swipe through profile pictures. They undulate, defying the reality of liquid crystal pixels, biting my fingertips through the conductive indium coating the […]
Humans like make commerce, yes?It’s vaguely cat-shaped—it knows humans like cats—but with five legs, because it’s never seen a cat, and purple because all of the things that make up BigHappyFriend are purple.The cat-thing holds out a root carved into a familiar shape. I take it and turn it around. I think they’re supposed to […]
Hear me: it is the second cencycle of decay, the forty-fifth season of cancer, the third cycle of exodus from Indus the Magnificent, and I am the last oracle left. For many eras, our peoples thrived in Indus: our titan, our world of worlds, our galaxy-cleaving vessel. We slept curled in aer cell clumps. We […]
When I was young I had a recurring nightmare of meeting God. Capital G, God. In my dream, God is a very bright light. So bright you can’t help but cower. God-light roars. Not like Aslan or the intro to an MGM film, but like a rocket launching into space. God-light is painful. Not like […]