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.
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It is rather simple to deduce what’s missing based on what’s been left behind. A second toothbrush in the bathroom of an old woman’s apartment. A baby’s bib and other such things hidden away in the closet of a quiet couple with sad eyes. A jewelry box under the bed of the local lady’s man, and a dusty engagement ring beneath it. A bracelet hanging on the doorknob of a locked door. In the few days Twilight had been living in Lady Celestia’s mansion, she had… not seen things, no,…-
27.1 K • Completed
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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
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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…
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39.9 K • Ongoing
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Pira’s intel was good; the service lift was right where she’d said it would be, fifty feet down a corridor off the side of the atrium. But that corridor was kinked into a trio of awkward corners, narrowed into choke-points, and punctuated by a steep switchback ramp. Empty hard-points pockmarked the walls and ceiling like scabbed sockets after tooth extraction. Everything was made of that same dull grey metal, just as spotless and dust-free as everything else inside the tomb — except for a few…
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39.9 K • Ongoing
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Elpida had made sure that every member of the cadre was trained in close-quarters combat — unarmed or otherwise. Even the few who had no natural aptitude, like Bug, or Shade. At thirteen years old she’d spent six painstaking months personally coaching Shade every day, both of them black and blue all over, sleeping together in each others’ scent, until Shade could last five minutes against Elpida herself. The cadre hardly needed help to work together — they had proven that with their first group…
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39.9 K • Ongoing
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Tracking Pira was easy; Elpida followed the trail of dried-out slime. The corridors beyond the resurrection chamber were made of uniform, seamless, silver-grey metal. Cold, windowless, and impossibly clean, without a single particle of dust. Flakes of dried slime stood out on the metal floor, scraps of crumbly translucent biomass caught in searing white illumination, from lights recessed behind thick plastic in the ceiling. Pira must have shed the flakes as the slime had dried on her skin, but the trail…
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39.9 K • Ongoing
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The machine womb was dying. Elpida saw it when she turned away from the door and the row of lockers — and away from Pira, who was plunging on alone into the depths of what could only be a Silico hive out in the deep green, the kind of structure that the best alienists in Telokopolis had only guessed at. Pira had also taken the only weapon: the lockers did not contain a second stun-baton, only several more grey jumpsuits. Elpida wished Pira good luck; a Silico construct wouldn’t flinch from a cattle…
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39.9 K • Ongoing
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Elpida scrambled out of her coffin and landed on cold metal. The drop to the floor was a greater distance than she’d expected, her joints were stiff as fresh-drawn wire, and her soles were slicked with that thin, greasy fluid. Lances of red light strobed and stabbed, a flicker of electric blood in the air; the alarm pulsed out a moaning dirge; voices screamed in terror and pain, sobbed deep and hard, and laughed on the edge of loss. Training took over. Elpida’s body became a coiled spring, fists…
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39.9 K • Ongoing
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A blossom of alchemical fire grew in quiet flesh; a spark took hold in the wet crimson darkness of muscle and marrow and memory. And Elpida choked back to life inside her own coffin. Blank grey steel, inches from her nose. Eyes aching like spent coals, lids rasping like sandpaper. A shallow layer of cold, greasy fluid clung to her back, her buttocks, the undersides of her legs. Hair slicked to her skull and stuck to her neck. A faint blue glow came from left of her head, illuminating her naked…
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39.9 K • Ongoing
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People will always think they know what and who you are. No matter what one does, what one says, what one is, they will slam a gavel in their mind and declare their verdict, weighing you down with the handcuffs they’ve now so rudely locked on your wrists. This man is a no-good deadbeat. This woman is a snob. This boy can do no wrong. This girl’s a whore. It can’t be helped, I suppose. There are scholars out there who I’m sure can explain this a thousand times better than I could…
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27.1 K • Completed
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