'Whatever happens, stick to the paths you know,' my father used to say ( Read more... )

As a child I would let the sun go down and walk for hours into the country. I took comfort in lying down beneath the far off stars. In finding myself erased, by distance and heat, and power. Now I am older. I know the scale of things, and how to weigh them. I know the simple numbers of contraction and flame. I am erased again by elegance and grace ( Read more... )

It had begun as a moment of epiphany, a vision of the truth sent from above. It had changed his life forever ( Read more... )

Chaxie is waiting for Kmyre to wake up. Chaxie is waiting for his throbbing flesh to heal: just so he can hit his comatose friend again. Right now that's all that's on Chaxie's mind. Chaxie is determined like that. Chaxie is focussed on that one thing. Even though his chitin is broken where he hit him last time, Chaxie is waiting. Chaxie will ( Read more... )

I was there when they fell from the sky, not many as can say that. It began slow enough. I remember the first of them land on old Mrs. Higgins in that motorised cart of hers, the one she used to terrorise toddlers and pigeons with ( Read more... )

The halls move in on him like sharks, crowding and coming in from obscure angles. The whole house is a predator. Up on the moor, it swallows what it can, and spits out the broken remains. The villagers sometimes find the victims, before they die of exposure. Knocked down by the wind and cradled by heather ( Read more... )

The chapel was draped in shadows of brown, ochre and silence; a rustic-looking womb of carved wood and cut stone; a suitable place to meditate on her rebirth, her purpose. A single shaft of light appeared through the eastern window, cutting into the low light, washing over where she knelt and down the aisle, illuminating hanging motes of dust that ( Read more... )

They make me to look this way, but it's just an after-effect. It's been forever since colonists birthed natural young. The patterntwitching prevents culture shock, for our neighbours, and ourselves. It holds back multiplicity... nothing is mine, everything is someone elses. All my identity is statistical error. My ankles come from the 23rd century ( Read more... )

Striding, leaping in pursuit of my prey; these wet crags and treacherous, broken rocks were not meant for a mech like mine, of brass and steam, and yet it is here I have followed Alexandra, my Princess, and her kidnappers. Ivan's sacrifice has led me here, and if I was not so inexorably driven by my own quest then I would continue still in ( Read more... )

Our pale horses are breakers upon the waves of grass that sweep across this open land. Pennants snap above us like handclaps to our hunting song and the clouds skid through the sky. These days are ours. After years of war, these lands are Xiao lands. All trace of resistance has melted away before the rumble of hooves ( Read more... )