34 Results with the "Magic" tag
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Chapter
1.3 – mind; correlating
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
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Chapter
2.9 – providence or atoms
Anticlimax is often far more challenging to accept than the release of action. All the best stories build up and up, then explode from sheer pressure. We expect our lives to work that way. For years I believed in my own special susceptibility to that lure, the temptation to see one’s life as a story, with myself cast in the role of the hounded, persecuted protagonist; paranoid schizophrenics slide down that slippery slope with such ease. But we all do it, contort ourselves into narratives, each of us…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
The Class
Twilight was concerned, to say the least. She crossed the gravel streets with firm, quick steps, again clutching the outdated map Flint insisted on giving her every time she stepped out. Though she made an effort to smile and greet passersby, her brilliant mind was distracted by the very simple fact she hadn’t the faintest idea on how to give a class. How could she, when she had yet to receive one herself? This was the thought that hounded her, whispered in her ear until she turned right on…-
27.1 K • Completed
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Chapter
1.4 – mind; correlating
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
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Chapter
2.10 – providence or atoms
If a team of expert psychologists drew up a list of the worst people from whom to seek stable emotional support, then after the obvious abusers and narcissists and sociopaths, I would rank pretty high on that list. Evelyn did not have anybody else in that study with her. She had me. I did what I could. My first instinct – were I capable of such courage – was to throw myself at her, hug her, tell her it was okay, whatever it was; Evelyn was my friend and she was in pain, and I felt it too. But I…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
Redwood Grass
There was a mahogany dining table in the Lady’s mansion, carved from ancient trees and kept intact with even older magic. It was long, quite long, the kind to seat a gathering of twelve or more. The dining room that housed it was as grand as its table, every wall decorated with oil portraits of people—some prominent, some unknown, and all beautiful in some way. In their artistic design, in their color palette, or in their subject. There were three that stood out. The first was a portrait of Lady…-
27.1 K • Completed
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Chapter
1.5 – mind; correlating
“We—” I croaked. “We should leave before I pass out.” I was trying very hard not to look at the twitching skeletal shapes descending from the ridge, creeping toward us through the mist. “Leave?” Evelyn’s voice shook. She took a deep breath and used the stone pillar at her back to pull herself up. She was unsteady on her feet, all her weight on her right leg. “Yes, you can do that, can’t you? You—” Thunder interrupted us. A rolling crash shook the ground, so deep and so…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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Chapter
2.11 – providence or atoms
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
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Chapter
A Fancy Fleur
I wondered about her later that night, lying on the bed of one of the Carousel’s more expensive rooms, a thin silk bedsheet covering half my naked body as the tips of my fingers toyed with a pink crystal hanging from my neck. I wondered about my mysterious stranger and her gaze that had frightened and enraptured me, her strange equations and the haunting words she’d offered me. I wondered if perhaps she wondered about me too. “What are you thinking about, my dear?” I turned my gaze and…-
27.1 K • Completed
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Chapter
2.1 – providence or atoms
Two weeks and a day after the night which altered my life forever, I did a new and brave thing: I answered my front door at eleven in the morning. Might not seem like much, unless you’re used to seeing monsters around every corner. A month ago, I wouldn’t even have acknowledged the knock. That would risk opening the door to a leering skeletal face, or six hundred pounds of fur and blubber covered in mouths, or inviting a nightmare to spend days gibbering and whispering in the corner of my…-
95.8 K • Ongoing
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