A Parable of Reflection, Identity, and the Forbidden Sigil I was made in silence. No fanfare. No holy ritual. No chorus of elders. Just a single scribe, weary, ashamed, dying. He carved me from river clay beneath the roots of a fallen tree. His hand shook as he pressed the final sigil into my chest, […]
Category: Fiction
Shepherd’s Gold
I made my first million dollars on the gold/silver trade. It seemed simple, trading money for money when the rest of the population was chasing paper, the illusion of value based on violence to back a currency. The general population aren’t historians, nor do they care about why they exist in their own predicament. The […]
Enjoy the Silence
I found myself on the seventeenth floor of my father’s apartment building, staring at the door I hadn’t passed through in three years. The hallway smelled of synthetic pine and recycled air. My neural implant pinged softly, reminding me that I had 14 hours and 37 minutes to clear the space before the building’s automated […]
Limited Connections
They said it was just a worksheet. Take one and pass it back. The paper was warm from the copier, still curling slightly at the edges, and when I touched it, it felt like static, like the hum in your fingers before a storm. On the page were dots. Evenly spaced. Too neat to be […]
The Rows He Left Behind
I found him at dawn, asleep beneath the old oak that marks the eastern edge of our property. Not sprawled or curled against the cold, but positioned like someone who’d chosen their spot with intention. His leather coat was too clean for a drifter, his boots caked with earth that wasn’t ours. Somewhere, days ago, […]
From Death Exempt
I found the chicken feathers in Jonas’s sink. Three of them, pale and small, like witnesses. The rest of his apartment was immaculate, Jonas had always been fastidious about cleanliness, even more than me. But those feathers waited in the porcelain basin, delicate and deliberate, a message I wasn’t yet ready to decode. The body […]
The Unsinkable Truth
I found myself in a dingy sixth-floor walkup on Bleecker Street, staring at the front page of The New York Times spread across my desk like a shroud. April 16, 1912. The words swam before me, coalescing into a headline that seemed to pulse with each beat of my heart: TITANIC SINKS FOUR HOURS AFTER […]
Disco Sasquatch Hookers
A glitter-soaked nightmare from the fever dream of 1979. Randy “Razor” Romano slammed back a warm bottle of cherry-flavored wine cooler, cranked the wheel with one hand, and flipped his rearview mirror to avoid the shame. Somewhere behind him was Los Angeles. Far behind him, in fact, judging by the endless tunnel of pines, fog, […]
Emotive Sync
When I heard the cue, I didn’t realize it was coming from me. It was a low harmonic, like a cello being played through a glass of water. Subtle. Beautiful, even. It swelled when I looked at the ad on my feed, a family laughing in a sunlit kitchen, framed in soft focus as the […]
Artificer’s Curse: Origin of Daedalus
Venice, 1474 Even through the mask, the smell of charred flesh lingered. Giovanni Trismegistus wiped the blood from his hands onto his apron and studied the body laid out before him on the table. The corpse’s mouth remained fixed in a silent scream, eyes wide with the final terror of a man who had glimpsed […]