Chapters
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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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34.1 K • Ongoing
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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…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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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…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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Late afternoon lay over the palm-dappled canal town with the soft authority of habit. Laundry snapped between second-story balconies. The sparring yard behind Old Hu’s tea shed was dusty from boys dragging heels through practice stances. Wooden bridges crossed the canal in stacked angles, darkened by old rain and hand oil. Children shouted over the water. Someone fried fish with too much pepper. Someone cursed at a pump engine that had survived the Horror, the reconstruction, three floods, and every…-
56.5 K • Ongoing
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A streak of fire burned above the arena mouth, white at the core, red at the tail, falling through the carved mountain throat. For one moment, the crowd believed it was part of the show. Mali popped one leg behind her and made an exaggerated visor with her hand. “Ooooh? Shooting star? Should Mali make a wish, or is that—” The star slammed outside the tournament temple. Mali shrieked, and ducked for cover. The impact shook the mountain. Dust burst from the high tiers. A line of…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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Condors fluttered by as tiles and trigrams went down in a grid around them, clinking, clinking, until the workers shooed them away. They continued to watch the repair in collective fervor, cocking their heads as the thing came back together, as if befuddled as to how all these squares made a circle. A uniformed snake (even had the Saion-ji employee of the month badge) slithered on and tried to gobble one with a lunge. It chomped air. The would-be snack had disappeared— literally, here and then it was…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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Bakuga Kōten of the Burning Sparrow School was called next against Kurohane Shigure, the Rain-Crow Ronin, a narrow demon in a lacquered crow mask and a traveler’s cloak darkened by spells of perpetual rain. His sword was longer than his arm and black along the back, the edge flashing clear whenever he breathed; around his shoulders hung wet feathers, though no water touched the ring, and each step he took left a small black footprint that evaporated after his shadow passed. Mali bounced along. “If…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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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…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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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…
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34.1 K • Ongoing
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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…
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56.5 K • Ongoing
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