pyromist

i fall asleep under grey windswept skies in the heart of our little industrial downtown on the top of a double-decker bus (it isn't an exceptionally beautiful day) i awake lazily, slowly, centered - the novelty of my perch rendering the view riveting (it isn't an exceptionally beautiful day) unexpected sunlight strobing through a leafless wood painting my retinas with the world, pixel count infinity the little prince once saw a drawing of a boa constrictor eating an elephant which everyone else mistook for a hat (it isn't an exceptionally beautiful day but) it's a fucking gorgeous day to be alive.

Dear Gabe, The thing about our God is, He's never Fallen. It's not much: a single tumbling eternity squeezed in between one breath and the next, a jolt of pain as your essence is cleaved along with your wings. It's not the pulverizing soul-grinding agony you might imagine; not even crippling pain, to be honest. It's over before your first heartbeat - even as your heart takes that very first spasm from stillness toward a steady rhythm. The mortal lifespan is but a fleeting moment to our God, yet this instant hardly lasts even a mortal eyeblink. Just like that. And the thing about Falling is, it doesn't mean you're taken by the darkness. Well

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away: A superintelligent race composed of raw electrical power discovered on their monitoring systems a small, insignificant planet. This planet was utterly unremarkable: a molten iron core covered with a carbon-based skin of life. Any life formed out of things so large and unwieldy as atoms was clearly inferior to a fluid energy-based existence, which was the only right and proper way to live, and so they would have dismissed this as another useless anomaly save for one fact. On this planet, the "Earth", there was developing a growing body of electronic life which was quite inexplicably being opp

It was five thirty-three on Monday afternoon when Reginald went mad. He'd been expecting something like this to happen for some time, to be quite honest. A trickle of madness - or a raging, flooding-over-the-banks river of insanity, to be more accurate - ran through his family. It'd all begun with Grandfather and his sudden insistence on the existence of elves. Or possibly it was faeries; there had been quite a lot about the "Faerie Realm" and its "denizens". In any case, they'd put it up to old age and Alzeheimer's. When Great-Aunt Wilhemina began to talk about dragons, the family had gotten a bit more worried and had both of them checked o

Without warning, he leaned in and kissed her full on the lips. He tasted of pears and salt; a strange mingling of flavors, but not entirely unpleasant. The salt of the earth, she thought, and the fruit that grew from it. She remembered, as a child, watching her mother dip sliced pears meant for the king's table in saltwater to keep their flesh creamy white. Her gaze flicked to his tanned skin and a smile tugged at her lips. Definitely not a pear. Around them, pear-white petals drifted from the trees like seasonally challenged snowflakes. Her head itched and she could already feel her hair beginning to part. Fascinated, she reached up slowl

The town was all dust and flies, panting dogs and swaybacked nags. Sunset seared the sky with its last sullen rays, casting the street below into shadow. The weathered buildings that lined the street were rounded and worn by the relentless wind; but their shadows were sharp-edged and dark and bottomless, two-dimensional reliefs that stretched across the pounded dirt of the main street like grasping fingers. He rode slowly, wiping grime from his face with an already dust-coated sleeve. He was the only person on the street; the town looked eerily empty, as if all its human occupants had vanished into the ether. A fierce heat wave had rolled ov

By the time she found the third snow leopard, his skinned carcass grotesquely twisted against a backdrop of bloody snow, she was furious. And she didn't know why. She was nothing more than a cat, by any judge of outward appearance: a sleek snow leopardess with a pelt so liberally dusted with black rosettes, like the star-strewn sky above, that it'd earned her the name Celestia. But she was a leopardess who lived on the snowy slopes of the Frostfang mountains; and the magic rampant on this young world was especially powerful here, running along the precipitous spine of Azeria. So perhaps it would have been simpler to say that she was nothing

sometimes i feel like an imposter in my own life

An icy breeze swept down the crooked street, lifting swirls of powdery snow from the drifts heaped on every corner. Fluffy snowflakes drifted over the slate rooftops, each one twirling down out of the velvet-black sky. One flake landed, feather-light, on the gloved palm of an outstretched hand. Ryuthel lowered his arm and peered at the snowflake, a pristine crystal almost lost on the brown expanse of his glove. The elf smiled slightly, as if at some half-remembered memory, then turned and locked the door to the family apothecary. He thrust his hands back into his pockets and moved on down the street. It was well past sunset on the shortest

what, now, do you suppose is the resale value of a secondhand soul? scuffed by mundanity though it's really not so bad if somewhat tattered dog-eared and a little bit sad. but     you         could teach it to fly again in a world of leprechauns and luck rainbows (and unicorns!) and purple talking ducks to love and to live and to lose and to soar teach my secondhand soul to believe in something more