Chapters
This is a list of all chapters on this site, using the Chapters page template. You can add content above the list, but you don’t have to. Note that the Works parent menu item also links to this page but is invisible in the mobile menu thanks to the not-in-mobile-menu CSS class.
-
Slipping was never the same twice. Once, when I was twelve years old, it gripped me as I stepped into the shower. A jerk and a twist and another world bloomed around me; I crept naked for hours through a rotting jungle beneath a throbbing black sun. My parents found me curled up under my bed, drooling and insensible. When I was a little older I went missing in the middle of school. Everyone recalled I’d been in biology class, but I never arrived at maths. I’d rounded a corner behind my classmates…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
The gravekeeper’s chamber: two dozen feet of grey metal pyramid with the top scooped off; a black sphere cradled in that apex, blank and still; the upright coffin with half a girl inside, more wire and tube than flesh and bone. Elpida did not see the avatar speak. None of them did, except perhaps Ilyusha. The others were clustered on the laboratory side of the first room, with the corpse and the coffin hidden by the dividing wall. By the time they recovered from the shock of the mechanical…
-
39.9 K • Ongoing
-
-
Evelyn wound up the parable of The Castle, watching me with faint hope in her eyes. “That’s … very comforting,” I said. I hadn’t yet constructed my own far less optimistic version. She nodded and smiled a sad kind of smile. “It does make some sense of things, even if it’s a bad metaphor. Map isn’t the territory and all that. The other way to think of it, which my mother was fond of, is that God was a poor workman who left a lot of holes in reality, but, eh.” All my two-week-long…
-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
For the first couple of years after Wonderland, after my trip down the rabbit-hole, after losing my twin, after the doctors and the hospitals and the drugs and the dislocation, I did speak to spirits. Mostly I screamed at them to go away. Twelve-foot figures of dripping neon had stalked the nighttime hallways of Cygnet Children’s Hospital. Often they’d wander into my room, ghosting through the door and crawling up the walls and watching me in bed, too terrified to sleep. I’d scream and rave and…
-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
Thirty minutes. That was Raine’s estimate. Thirty minutes stuck in a room with two very angry people who hated each other for reasons I didn’t understand, waiting for Raine to return before either of them felt well enough for attempted murder. Thankfully, neither seemed inclined to get up yet. Twil had hunched tighter around her imaginary stomach wound, while Evelyn brooded, her eyes barely open and fixed on Twil with dark intensity. I did as I’d promised, positioned myself behind one of the…
-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
My stamina gave out long before we caught the Demon. I’d never been very fit. Scrawny legs, no real strength. Hadn’t gotten any serious exercise since childhood. Raine had insisted we not run. Hurrying along Sharrowford’s canted, hilly streets for over an hour was more than enough to drain what little reserves I had. I gave in on the corner of Harries Road, slowed and stumbled to a stop and doubled over with my hands on my thighs, sucking air through a raw throat. The ache in my diaphragm…
-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
We are all stories in the end. Your heart will stop, your breath will cease, your flesh will rot, but your story? It will live on and on, in the memories of those around you, in the dozens upon dozens of little echoes you left in your old apartment, in the corner of the local bar, in the scars you left while living on Earth. Two people sit at a bus stop. What they look like isn’t important. Neither are their names. The one on the left holds a paper in their left hand, the thin…-
4.9 K • Ongoing
-
-
First, we retraced our steps. More accurately, Raine retraced our steps and led me in her wake. She left no question as to who was going first, back through the double-doors to the corridor of Not-Willow-House. A familiar transformation came over her – watchful, alert, tense. My hand felt clammy in hers, my heart in my throat. In the fake corridors she eased each set of doors open with the tip of her boot, waited for any nasty surprises to jump out at us before proceeding. The Medieval…
-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
-
Elpida took command. “Into the gravekeeper’s room, now!” Click-click-click went metal on metal, racing down the lift shaft. “Amina, hold onto that shield and get behind the wall. Vicky, grab three more ballistic shields, toss them back there, then start flipping tables, pile them in the archway. Atyle, you take a shield as well then get behind the wall. And help Kagami, hunker down. Howl—” Elpida froze. The others froze with her, hanging on her words; they didn’t know…
-
39.9 K • Ongoing
-
-
I halted at the front gate to Evelyn’s house as Raine stepped onto the garden path. When she realised I wasn’t following, she turned and raised her eyebrows at me. “You have got to be joking,” I said. “Evelyn lives here? Alone?” “Her family owns the house. It’s complicated. Come on, it’ll be fine, she won’t bite, not this time.” We’d left campus about twenty minutes ago, skirted the northern side of the student quarter, and crossed over into Sharrowford’s frayed eastern…
-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
- Previous 1 2 3 … 5 Next
