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.
-
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…-
39.9 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
-
-
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
-
-
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
-
-
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
-
-
“Can’t miss it” turned out to be a typically Raine-like oversight. The Medieval Metaphysics Department was hidden away in the furthest corner of Sharrowford University’s “new” building, Willow House, a snaking four-story structure of Brutalist concrete and brown glass, built in the 1960s to dominate the campus, alongside the Gothic spires and stonework of the university’s tiny old core. I’d fallen in love with the old university buildings on my very first visit. Soaring ceilings and oak…
-
95.8 K • Ongoing
-
- Previous 1 … 4 5
