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  • by Malik Womack Three men from Black Reed Hall entered in dark green robes, each with a reed flute tucked into his sash. Nobody looked at them until the last one stepped wrong and showed the iron plates beneath his sleeves. Then everyone looked. “Those must be dignitaries or somethin’,” Sesame said, leaning back for a better view. “Daimaō’s boys, maybe,” Yulaan said. “Means the big guy’s here.” Near the entrance, a bald oni spat into a bowl. He was brawny and broad, his skin a dark pale…
  • by Malik Womack Temujin and Enekai’s respective matches were so quick that the young man had forgotten what happened in them by the time the trumpets sounded. Those were long crooked horns blown by red-faced tengu clinging upside down to the rafters. The doors at the end of the hall opened with a groan. Beyond them, a staircase climbed into a vast chamber lit by fire the color of burning emeralds. Emeralds! What a tease. The gathered fighters moved. The main arena waited beyond the temple: a circular lei tai…
  • by Malik Womack The lei tai was simple from above and severe from within: a broad circle of bone-white square stone tiles, smoothed enough to be uncanny, and inlaid with eight equidistant bronze trigrams. Beyond it, nothing but red dirt and a moat of smoking black water in the pit below, then the tiers of demons ascending into the mountain’s throat. Four prayer-pillars stood at the cardinal points, wound with iron sutra chains. At the north wall, looming over the ring from a niche of red lacquer and soot, stood the…
  • by Malik Womack February 2056 MARIE Aurore walked the Quai de Valmy along the Canal Saint-Martin in the grey-blue light before the cafes opened. The plane trees were bare and black against the zinc rooftops, and the canal water sat flat and green-grey between its stone banks, and the cold was the kind of cold that did not bite but settled into clothing and stayed. Her breath came in small clouds that dissolved before they reached the iron railing at the water's edge. She wore a black double-breasted coat with brass…
  • by Malik Womack René Magritte - The Empire of Light (1954) Battleball Good mornings brought the Yabans out. Above Armstrong City, blue-lined white clouds rose like alpine mountains over the pines. Their shaded green went so deep it turned blue in places, an empire of light occupied by shadows. The city’s towers stood far off beyond the suburb, titanic panes of glass and steel half-lost in morning haze, their edges made ghostly by distance. The through-road carried cars toward them and away from them, a steady…
  • Makai-Ichi Budōkai – Chapter 21: Ketsu [Till Next Time, Friends!] Cover
    by Malik Womack “Earth to Temujin!!” Pink fingers snapped in front of his face. He looked to Sesame and pulled himself back to something that felt more comfortable than nirvana.  “Is it over?” She hugged him so tightly the air left him. He hugged back. Finally, a lovely touch. Yulaan came limping through the wreckage, hair ragged and down, side bleeding freely. She looked him up and down, taking in the burn marks, the dark wrist-curse, the stupid living face. Then she rushed him, wrapped one arm…
  • by Malik Womack Saturday, April 30th The last thing Yulaan remembered before she passed out, she was doing the one thing every Saiyan does best: filling her mouth with food.  Once she came to, she found herself with her wrists chained and standing at the center of a stone circle that lay beneath an oculus of a grand Romanesque cathedral built with bad intentions. All around her, infernal tags and designs— goat heads on pikes, a giant pentagram of blood around the altar, black candles alit, occult runes given…
  • by Malik Womack The First Song of the Vitagashi Megas, as spoken through the people of the Yeren Khanate, from the Myths and Legends of Sovagulo Another world lived before this one. At the end of that world, there were two forces as warriors: Getavara and Tien-Rus. The Wrath of the Monkey Warrior Getavara had, over eons, calmed to temperance as He rose to godhood.  Getavara slayed and Getavara fought until time ravaged the populations of the old world. Every act of creation had begun to calm Getavara…
  • by Malik Womack Ashens Square, Armstrong City The bomb found the west atrium at 9:47 PM. The blast peeled marble from the facade in slabs and the fireball that followed consumed oxygen so fast that windows three blocks east bowed inward, held, then gave up. Inside, the Impressionist wing filled with plaster dust and aerosolized pigment drifting in thermals of superheated air. Gerald Mackey, third-shift security, had been eating a turkey sub in the east corridor monitoring station when the blast knocked his chair…
  • by Malik Womack I. A rented Buick shot through the Jersey pines, rattling and battling against a scarred, pocked road toward a sharp bend around a hill that hid their destination like an asshole. Walter Lattimore folded the road map into his lap and let Vernon do the swearing. Vernon Asch had been swearing since Toms River. He kept swearing and the other two were about to swear. They were three: a Times man, a sociologist, and a writer of sweat-magazines, respectively gravity, framework, and prurience by way of…
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