Tag: short story

“The Apiarist” Excerpt 1: Magnia Livia

I’ve begun writing a long story/short novella in the Piraeus-headspace (like the Halia and Dreamfish pieces, except way longer and way more tangential), and I’ll be posting the mostly-unedited segments here. Highly unfinished and likely not at all in the order they’ll be for the finished product, but hopefully good reading.

The one who visited the chapterhouse that season was named Livia–Magnia Livia, the Knight Captain enforced, for failure to address the Magni by their proper title was punishable by Sacristi.  She arrived in Piraeus, as was traditional for Kolai dignitaries, in a palanquin suspended on barbed handles carried by chanting acolytes–the Order of the Blades of Kol, temporarily bereft of their deific wielder–steps perfectly synchronized, immaculate, precise control belied by mania stitched in bloodshot eyes.  I remember finding it at once appropriate and deeply unnatural.  I saw in it a reflection of the rules and ritual of the chapterhouse–though perhaps I was merely part of the mirror image–in turn a careful mold to the deliberate equities and geometries of Piraeus itself, though this was an irony I would not realize until much later.  

But in their hymns and mutilations I could sense a current connecting them, focusing them in burning passion toward horrifyingly singular end.  I did not know why the feeling was familiar to me, nor why I found it so perverse, but I was possessed of many misconceptions back then.  So was the Knight Captain, it turned out.

Prior to the Magnia’s arrival, the Knights had sorted us according to their impressions of our magical aptitude, toward vocations of knight, servant, or squire as our capabilities allowed, but even then, in the “Era of Free Magic”, certain forms of mana were repellant enough that cultural awareness of them all but vanished with distance from the World City.  The Blood Knight chapterhouse in Piraeus thus had minimal record of the mana currents that existed in the microsensory networks of swarms, they did not look for those currents in their recruits, and they had little ability to find them even if they were so inclined.  But this was part of the reason the Magni supervised the recruiting process.

I was surprised to find that Magnia Livia showed little regard to the stiff sort of ritual espoused by the Blood God’s other faithful.  Far from the Knight Captain’s stone-faced severity–an attitude I had come to understand as the invariable face of the Kolai–Livia was warm, mirthful, middle-aged and slightly overweight, but effusively energetic.  Upon her first tour of the chapterhouse, she loudly bemoaned the asceticism of the squires’ quarters, the kitchens’ stores of spices, the frequency with which Sacristi was exacted from the servants:

“‘It is not suffering for which we care,’” she said, quoting Kolai scripture.  “Stop this at once, Captain.”

I found it odd at the time that the Knight Captain was willing to suffer such admonishment from a bureaucrat, but I was naive.  I later learned that Livia could have eviscerated him with a gesture were she truly displeased–a prowess I saw for myself in the Dereliction when she slaughtered a militia of over 300 before the Lady of the Flies overwhelmed her.  And it proved I would owe far more of my fate to Livia than the Knight Captain.  It seemed I had potential of which I was unaware, and she recognized it immediately.
“You’ve misjudged these ones,” she remarked to him, patting me and two other would-be squires on the head.  And with that single gesture she altered my destiny.  No longer was I to be a foot soldier to an institution that bound the world by code, by a paradigm of sense to match its chaos.  I was to be a leader of that institution, and I was to discover all the degrees of deeply unsustainable freedom it allowed itself.

Dreamfish

Another flash-story in the same setting as The Praetor “From Thazan”.

You’ve never seen a dreamfish.  You think you can say whether they exist or not?  Shut your idiot mouth.  You can barely feel the mana you’re huffin’ on a good day–doubt you’ll even comprehend what the dreamfish are swimmin’ in.  Yeah. You gotta comprehend before you can see it–it’s backwards that way.

What?  Ain’t satisfied?  Tough shit.  I didn’t tell you that to convince you it was true.  I told you because it is true, and I hoped you’d hear it and then go the fuck away.  This is a sizeable establishment.  Go find some other corner to infest. 

But. 

You’re still here.  You’ll have to pardon me–it’s difficult to tell the difference between curiosity and envy these days, and no, I will not elaborate.  But you haven’t fucked off yet, and I’m thinkin’ you may have a mind to act on this, so fine.  I’ll share more.  Ain’t like it’s gonna hurt me.

So you ever met a Sunsinger?  Like one of those sleazy storyteller types with the “gather round! Gather round!” who’ll sit against the wall like that’un there and slur out some half-baked folklore while picking your pocket for ale?  Or maybe you just know the generic variety?  Whatever–bardic tradition is dying like everything else.  Even the generics are liable to break out the creation story, though.  You know: Night Sky dreams the world and three animals–three Old Gods–wheedle their way into its stewardship.  But then there are other stories–sometimes with the same gods, sometimes new ones.  Like the one where the Night Sky breaks the Fox’s nose.  Were they fighting–as the Diarchians told it–over the campfire he built or over the scarab he mentored in the Khettite myth?  Particularly: Were there Old Gods besides the three?

Short answer’s yes.

Longer answer, well, you get that the Blood God was just a mage, right?  A fucking strong one, yeah, you don’t just jump from drip-drinking mana to leveling cities, but he wasn’t the first one to brush up against the metaphysical.  What?  Does it seem so unbelievable that animals can learn magic?  That the world’s first super-mage was a fucking fox?  Keep your shoes on.  It gets weirder still.

History’s hard, and I’ll spare you the details, but it’s likely the Old God pantheon was way bigger than the old Kolai orthodoxy taught.  All the spirits and “gods” you heard about in the stories, the Scarab, the Moon Lily, the Wendigo: They were all probably rolling with capital G’s.

You…don’t get it?  Fucking godshell, kid.  If you take nothing else from this conversation, you ought to learn to read.

Anyway, obvious assumption: The world’s finite.  Where’d that come from?  Shut the fuck up and pay attention.  The world’s a dream, right, and a dream has a beginning, an end, and boundaries: limits in psychic time and space.  The substance of the world is mana, death, not an especially great outlook, but that ain’t my point.  My point is: What happens at the end of the world?  Is there mana and then, just, nothing?  Don’t give me that “no one’s ever seen the end of the world” crap.  It’s a fucking embarrassment.

Kid, we’re in Piraeus.  If you wanna see the edge of the world, go outside and just look west.  It’d be one thing if no one who sailed over that horizon ever returned, but I challenge you to name one person who ever tried.  You can’t, right?  You think maybe someone has to have had this idea before because it’s so damn obvious, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: Lots of people have sailed west before.  You don’t remember them because they aren’t in the dream anymore.  Oh, they’re dead too–that ain’t ambiguous, but we’re getting to it.

So engrave this in your memory: I’ve gone there.  It don’t look like much, not to your eyes, just open water and clear-ish sky, but if you’re attuned to it, the mana out there is strange.  It’s not nothing, but there’s a gradient, a blurry, gradual frontier where the death loses its structure.  It stops making things, stops enforcing causal relationships.  And it’s hard to perceive, even if you can channel mana, because more than likely it’s taking all the focus you’ve got to keep your mind from unraveling.  Buf if you somehow get that down, all you gotta do to see them is look up.

They’re everywhere out there.  Dreamfish.  These swirling loci of that proto-mana, maybe just eddies in the entropy that laps at the border of the Night Sky’s mind–but they’re stable enough to persist for awhile.  And make no mistake, they’re fucking dangerous.  They’ve got these tentacles dragging from ‘em, and if they touch you, they’ll spiralize your soul, take your essence and slurp it like chowder in a whirlwind.  The fuck is that metaphor?  It’s messy and ugly, just like the process.  Should watch it sometime.

So that’s why you can’t see ‘em.  But that ain’t why you’re asking, is it?  This ain’t about me and my crazy talk.  You’re bothering me because you heard about dreamfish out there, and you heard about dreamfish out there because of Legion.  The Cult’s schism has blown this whole business public, and now crazy Edward’s crazy stories aren’t so crazy anymore.  Fuck you all, it was easier when you thought I was crazy, because now you think I’m important, but you still aren’t going to listen.  You think that the problem is that Legion’ll swarm the Hospitality Quarter again or some other nonsense, because you can’t bear another look into the infinity mirror of the society you chose.  You can’t stand knowing that you’re all the same.

No, the problem is the Cult.  The problem is Glaucus.  The problem is the Old God we found out here at the edge of the world eating dreamfish–the Old God who we couldn’t just leave alone.  The problem is that half this city is high on a kraken’s dandruff and can’t give up the notion that their psychoplasmic degradation must mean something.  You can take it or leave it, but the truth is it ain’t worth shit.  You’ve been offered the Terminal Man’s product by now, yeah?  My advice is you fucking decline.  Only thing down that way is suffering and an eventual cessation of existence.

Oh, what is that sneer?  A tepid fucking thing, like you wanna fight with an “or flight” in parentheses.  Had a taste, have you?  Carry the fuck on, then.  I know where you’ll end up eventually.  It is inevitable.

The Praetor “From Thazan”

A short story I speedwrote as part of a setting document for an upcoming project. This is set in the world of Rale (like Three and Two and Two) but several centuries earlier. Again, a reminder that Promises for a Worse Tomorrow and Three and Two and Two are both heavily discounted on all formats and platforms until the end of January. If you haven’t picked one of them up yet, now is a perfect time!

No one in Piraeus remembered when exactly Halia Eleria–called “the Thazanian” by her detractors–arrived.  It wasn’t so simple as her becoming an irreplaceable fixture of the city, though she seemed on her way to accomplish that.  Rather, just as no one could pinpoint the timeframe of her arrival, everyone was dead sure it wasn’t that long ago.  Everyone could remember a time when she hadn’t been there, though Piraeus’ most introspective folk certainly found it odd that they couldn’t remember any specific event that occurred during that time.

Still, it was damned obvious she wasn’t from around here.

The “Thazanian” thing reportedly came from her own mouth.  Eavesdroppers to a conversation between her and Praetor Cleonar at the Calibratory Festival two years ago–or was it three?–reported a discussion of her childhood in Saltstill.  Thazan, the Khettites used to call it, back when Saltstill was a Khettite city, though Halia didn’t much look like a Khettite, Grayskin or otherwise.  Meanwhile, in a speech to the council last year, she cited her experience managing a famine in her home village to the East, in old Kolai territory.

Ultimately, the most convincing account of Halia’s ancestry arrived by way of a rhetorical question from old Edward the Pirate during one of his drunken rants at the tavern in the Fisherman’s Quarter:

“Does it fucking matter where she’s from?  You have a place in mind that’ll make her trustworthy?”

This argument didn’t satisfy anyone, exactly, but few could argue with him.  Indeed, no one trusted Halia, though the reasons why this should be the case were varied and nebulous.

Her politics hardly raised eyebrows.  By every account, her ministry over the city’s aquaculture and trade, to which she had been appointed over her own objection by Praetor Pierron, had saved thousands of lives last summer during the siege by the forces of the Revián’s self-proclaimed Highlord.  There was a superstitious handful that blamed her for the ensuing plague of ectoplasm that now ravaged the Hospitality Quarter, but these accusers held that the plague was divine punishment for the cowardice the city had shown in refusing to mount a counteroffensive against the Highlord.  Anyone keeping score could point out that Halia had abstained from the Council vote which had sealed the gates that summer–how could she be blamed for a decision she had not supported?

Unseemly though it was, the most pervasive criticism against Halia was for her appearance.  None could accuse her of neglecting formality, but her ubiquitous wardrobe, the impeccable silken tunic, hose, and long gloves, the heavy cloak she wore over them–they were all too pressed, too clean, too white.  And they covered everything from the neck down.  Not even her eyes were visible, as she was in the habit of wearing spectacles with dark-tinted glass, even indoors.  It was uncanny, many thought, and her still, perfect poise gave few if any reminders that what lay beneath all her finery was especially human.

Indeed, there was a vocal minority that claimed she was actually not human.  Some said she was a mermaid, hiding her disfigured fish-body beneath all that silk.  Others speculated that she was some sort of crocodilian face-stealer, that her anatomy was human enough, but her too-still posture and too-sharp teeth betrayed what lurked beneath her pilfered skin.

Few listened to Edward’s observation that what she had “stolen” was capital in nature: Over the course of the wars with the Highlord, more and more of the city’s industries seemed to be pulled under the financial auspices of Halia’s affiliates.  The fishery had become a funnel to a single intermediary buyer, the navy had contracted its supply lines to Halia’s merchant captains, every single stall in the Market Quarter was now owned and rented out by trade companies who could, if placed under the appropriate duress, provide documentation linking their provenance to a certain alleged Thazanian.

The rumors and accusations against Halia never stuck, of course.  Her control was never obvious.  She was no crocodilian.  She never seized what she wanted to hold, never bit what she wanted to consume.  She merely drew close, helpfully reached out, and slowly, nigh-unnoticeably, drank it.