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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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…-
9.8 K • Ongoing
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My lips glistened with a rather costly lipstick—my very own blood. The noises around us faded from my mind. They became distant, so very distant, and all that mattered was her. Her, as she held me, and her, now stained with my life’s pulse liquefied. Her thin, weak arms of a scholar surrounded me, so different and distinct than those of the many men and women that had claimed my body before. The curtains fell. In the distance, I heard thunderous applause. “The show must go on,” I told…-
54.1 K • Completed
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On the day I met Raine, the first thing I did was jerk awake in bed and vomit nightmares into my lap. That’s not quite accurate. If I could purge the nightmares like a bad meal then life would be a lot easier. No, I brought up bile and what little I’d managed to keep down over the last couple of days, then dry-heaved through the aftershocks, shaking and coated in cold sweat. The nightmares had lashed at me for two weeks; last night set a new record of unbroken pain. For a long moment I screwed my…-
191.3 K • Ongoing
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It was ugly, really. Horrid. She stared at herself in a small mirror, the gem around her neck barely catching her eye. “Stunning,” the salesman said. “That color is perfect for you.” She ignored him. He didn’t know what he was talking about. The gem on this necklace was too big and tawdry. Not at all like the simple, elegant silver thing a few inches farther down the display, with diamonds so small and clear they looked like pinpricks of light running down the chain. It had caught…-
43.4 K • Completed
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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…-
79.6 K • Ongoing
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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…
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191.3 K • Ongoing
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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…
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54.1 K • Completed
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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…
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191.3 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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79.6 K • Ongoing
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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…
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191.3 K • Ongoing
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