skonen_blades: (Default)
It was dark in the cabin
Romantic
Just the two of us
The only light was coming from the fireplace
She asked me to put another log on the fire
I reached out and patted around in the shadows
Grabbed my wooden heart by accident
And threw it in
Along with my Pinocchio strings,
Paper-thin hopes,
My kindling future plans,
Gasoline dreams,
That picture of us at our most in love,
Six winning poker hands,
And since I'd just graduated from university,
I bet my doctorate and masters,
And raised the fire two degrees.
Also, the wet sock of my conscience
Which filled the room with smoke.
At first, we burned with desire
But then we just burned
Even though we went our separate ways
Our bones are still up there
Two silver skeletons
Dipped in moonlight past
Embracing
Clinking teeth and clattering hips
Naively
Blessedly
Unaware that we left




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skonen_blades: (Default)
Fires can start in the rain.
They can go on to rage as the water comes down.
Fires can start in the winter as well.
It’s easy to forget those two things.
When it’s been raining in your life for years.
Or cold for much longer than a season.
You start to think the state is unchangeable.
That fire is only in the past.
That it can’t ever be here now.
Even that it won’t ever exist in the future.
But most importantly, that you can’t start a fire.
You can.
You can.
It’s the oldest trick we humans can do.
We rub together to ignite.
Burning down houses is what we do best.
Fire is a catalyst for change.
A critical mass that chains exploding molecules.
And creates a different state.
What’s burnt can’t be unburnt.
And burning only needs a spark to start.
So if your life needs burning down.
Or if a little fire could cauterize a wound.
Or if a little heat could fix something.
It’s possible.
Do you need to get rid of some flammable relationships
That have been pretending to not be paper?
Have you been on a bridge in need of destruction by fire
For years?
Break out the marshmallows.
Let the air in.
And dance around the fire with your shadow flickering behind you.
You might get a little burnt yourself.
So be careful.
But just remember:
Just because it’s cold.
Just because it’s raining.
Doesn’t mean that a fire can’t happen.



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skonen_blades: (Default)
A red horse and a pink turtle met in a field in the middle of winter. They were cold so they sought shelter in the nearby forest. Between the trees of the deep forest they found the Sun. It was dressed as an owl with red and yellow feathers shining like burnished brass that had been soaked in the sun. It radiated brazier heat, turning the trees and ground around them springtime. An albino raven perched on a branch just outside the aura of warmth, almost lost against the snow. Raven was the moon.

“Red horse. Pink turtle. You have found shelter with me but it comes at a price,” said Sun Owl.

“Price” croaked Moon Raven.

“You will have to join us. Become part of the pantheon,” invited Sun Owl.

“Join us” croaked Moon Raven.

“What shall we be?” asked Red Horse.

Turtle stared. He only spoke to add to the conversation. Horse had already asked the question he wanted to ask so he patiently waited for the answer.

“Red Horse, you shall be a new season of fire. You shall be my flare. You shall be my flint. You will walk among the brush and trees, igniting with your aura.” proclaimed Sun Owl.

Red Horse wasn’t so sure he liked this idea. He thought of all the death he could cause if he wasn’t careful. Not just humans but all the forest creatures. But if it meant he would live, he had a hard time refusing.

Sun Owl turned to Pink Turtle, “Turtle, you shall be a new season of winter without snow. A pink, naked season with branches withered, leaves and flowers dead, but no white blanket to tuck them in. A season of desolation without the muffling blizzard. If the clouds must burst, it will be rain. Mud will be plentiful. Erosion will change the face of mountains.”

Turtle, too, didn’t care for being the mascot or patron animal of this new season. But he preferred not to freeze to death as well.

Red Horse and Pink Turtle looked at each other.

“Decide” croaked the Raven.

Red Horse turned back to them and said yes. Turtle slowly nodded his head.

“Very well. You are chosen. Stay still. The raiments of your new office will coalesce around you.” said Sun Owl.

The air shimmered around Red Horse. His mane and tail burst into flame but it didn’t hurt. Fire skated over his torso, snaking and flickering but never going out. His eyes glowed red. The ground under his hooves started to smoke.

The air shimmered around Pink Turtle. He grew in size into an immense turtle as tall as Red Horse. His shell became encrusted with glittering frost that melted and dripped from the new icicle tips around it. He grew a beard of ice. His eyes fluoresced into the blue of sea algae at night.

They left the forest that night, saddened at their new duties but happy to be alive. They knew that they would rarely cross paths from this point forward. Being seasons, they had a lot of work to do. But luckily Sun Owl had said for they were chaotic beasts that could run and traverse the countries of the world with little rhyme or reason.

And roam they do. Valuing the times they meet. Spreading fire and mud everywhere else.



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skonen_blades: (Default)
The horses were screaming as they ran through the burning underbrush. It was night so they acted as torches lighting the devastation around us. I’ve heard that most animals smell like pork when they burn but these horses smelled didn’t. There was a smell to their crisping flesh that was very much equine. I can’t describe it.

I huddled in the darkness, letting waves of orange light and the acrid smoke flow around me. My hands burned for release. The pent up energy, dammed into my fingertips, waiting for the right key words to let them out.

All these defenses. I had no idea there’d be so many. The idea was to torch the barn to bring the emergency services and maybe distract the owners into running outside to fight the blaze themselves, leaving the house open to attack.

No such luck. As soon as I cast the first flame ward to the base of the barn, blue light sparkled up both sides of the house. A protection spell tinged with ice magic to protect it from the flames. It’s complicated to mix spells and even more complicated to store them, let alone set them into the bricks of your house with an automated trigger. That takes constant mage monitoring.

Who was I attacking? I’d been given this job as an in-between contracts sort of thing. The money seemed a little too good for the simplicity of the task but I was starting to think that I’d never see the paycheque.

My long hair dangled down out of my hood. I brought it back into a ponytail inside my cloak to stop it from singing. I cast a dampening spell around me but it made a lot of steam when the fire got close, making me an easy target.

The team was supposed to storm the house after I’d started the fire. I remember hearing battle cries cut short by a loud series of booms and a lot of brilliant flashes lighting up the clouds in front of the house. I was crouched by the back so I couldn’t see exactly what happened but I did recognize one or two of the glyphs that splintered up into my magician’s vision over the roof of the house.

Glenwyld’s Sword Form, if I wasn’t mistaken. That’d be Flendolyn. A shield of Hacksorrow. A protection spell from Willend. But the fact they were sharded was deeply worrying. This team wasn’t upper level but they had some clout. We were overqualified for this smash-and-grab mission and they were getting beaten if not torn to pieces out there. I should have seen some of Regalla’s flame work and Ouwatty’s lightning demon but I didn’t.

And there were nearly 8 spells I didn’t recognize.

Had we attacked a magician’s meeting? A cabal of the country’s best casters?

All I knew was that my job was over and I appeared to be extremely unsuited for rescue or combat
going by the evidence at hand.

Fleeing was my only option.

I washed a passing horse in my dampening aura and calmed him with sugar cube dreams. I hopped up on his back and spurred him, steaming forward into the darkness and away from the light.

The barn burned merrily behind me. The horses screamed.

I never saw my friends again. No one spoke of them at the usual meeting tavern and the rendezvous points remained untouched. Acquaintances we had in common claimed to have no knowledge of them anymore. Whether it was induced by sorcery or just regular thief prudency, I couldn’t tell.

I counted myself lucky to have survived and didn’t press the issue. I didn’t seek payment.
That’s why I moved to Overdale. It’s quiet here and I like it.



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skonen_blades: (Default)
In Vietnam, there was a regulation set on how long soldiers could use the flamethrowers.
Because if they used them for more than a week they developed a form of love for the flames
Some believed that they were a fire god
Having that much destructive power
Causing such primal death and injury
It sent them over the edge
And guilt hardened into glee
Power formed into addiction
Humanity was banished
They only had eyes for the fire

I think it’s the same

With being a man
With being white
With having privilege
Except I’ve never had my flamethrower taken away


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skonen_blades: (Default)
It’s not that the underground rose up to swallow everyone in a worm mouth warehouse entrance air hangar disappearing trench.
It’s not that microphones everywhere became lightning rods.
It isn’t even that bleached hair burst into flame, turning every activist into a small nuke.
It’s more like a horse became a secretary.
It’s more like the Titanic and the Hindenberg had a baby who grew up to pretend to be Santa Claus to kids and God to adults.
The rescue isn’t coming.
The parachute isn’t packed.
There are no air bags and the car is swerving out of control on the wet road.
There is a future coming that will make us nostalgic for brush fires, for a time when we’d only had two nuclear wars, for a time when cannibalism was rare.
I’m no electric guitar but I can hear the writing on the wall.
Pure jelly beans.
My understoodness has not been ratified.
But I can kill a zebra with my right wing and a statue with my left.
Both wings flapping is the bird version of applause.
Dive into my ice cream.
And rot.



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skonen_blades: (hamused)
AS THE DAWN COMES

I’m reminded of vampires and Egyptian gods.

This planet is very close to its sun. It’s what’s called a rock giant. As big as Jupiter back in the home system but solid. A superplanet nestled up to its star. Its orbit is a small circle but its revolution around its own axis is very long.

The result is that its day is longer than its year.

It’s called Abraxas.

I have a lot of debts. Too many, in fact. That’s why I’m here. There will be no more minimum payments or warnings or consolidation attempts. I am being punished live on a feed in front of all the bank’s customers so that they can see what happens to debtors.

On the dark side of Abraxas, the ground is cool and the atmosphere is thin. That’s the side I’m on.

The other side is on fire.

As the planet turns, the fire sweeps across the globe in a slow lazy meridian of cleansing death. An equator of dawn making its way around the planet every earth week.

And this is my seventh day here.

The horizon is starting to light up. This planet is so big that I can’t see any curvature. It’s like I’m standing on an ancient map and the world is flat. To my eyes, the skyline is a straight line and over the last hour, the west has become white. The sun is coming up like the birth of a god.

The tip of the star is starting to show and already the night sky has gone from starry black to twilight purple to earth blue to a strange, pinkish teal and now it’s shifting to red. The sky is catching fire and so is the ground.

My suit is insulated against the heat. They want it to become my coffin. They want it to become an oven. They want me to experience the rising sun on Abraxas. I think of vampires being afraid of the sun. I think of vampires sleeping in their coffins. I wonder if this is what the sun would look like to them.

The horizon gives birth to the glowing top edge of a circle and I have to turn my head to see the whole thing. I can’t comprehend the size of the sun I’m seeing.

And then I heard the sound of the wind and the fire in the distance. It’s like the planet is screaming as all the steam is cooked out of the cracks.

I can see the earth shimmer as the fire is starting to get close to me. Trees of flame are being planted and growing in time lapse. The planet is being strafed by gods.

I think of Egypt. I think of how their gods were immediate. Ptah, the creator of the universe, was just an inventor. His job finished a long time ago. He was not important. But Ra the sun god was important. He happened every day. He gave life and if you weren’t careful, he took it.

Here I am on Abraxas, watching a wall of fire approach and I smile. I feel important. I feel as if I am a supernatural creature about to be executed by a god and I feel euphoric.

I laugh as the superheated air reaches me and engulfs me. The last thing I see is that the sun isn’t even a fifth of the way up yet.

I rob the bank’s audience of any pleading or crying. I laugh as I burn.



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skonen_blades: (bounder)
Angry stairs claim the ankles of children to teach them lessons. Dictionaries with broken backs teach the vocabulary of victims to willing ears. Motel room infants and alley kids vie for the attention of roulette tables. Every path has a beginning. This is where Darlene came from. It was hot, even in the night time. She didn’t see snow until her thirteenth birthday.

Thirteen, for her, became a lucky number. That was the year she moved to a part of the world with a winter season. It was like being transplanted into a dream. The first snowfall she saw was like water on a fire. She felt like she was being extinguished, made into steam, and cooled. The fight felt over. The hard life seemed like it was softening.

Work was hard to get but she got something. Rooms were hard to find but she found one. Friends were difficult to come by but she managed to snag a few. A life of sorts started to develop in the cracks between the bricks of her life.

I met her when she was twenty-six. I would never have guessed she was that young. She was working part-time at the library. She was putting books back on shelves. As meetings go, it wasn’t Hollywood. It was clumsy. I think I was entertaining but I have nothing to base that on other than the fact that she said yes.

That was four months ago. I can still see the revolutions and the death in her eyes but I can see the glimmer of this new life glittering there as well. It’s like she’s pregnant with the idea that she might be able to relax and it’s growing month by month.

Calm ladders embrace the wings of angels to let them rest for a while. Thesauruses with strong arms give other words to use in place of bad ones. Mansion brats and million dollar babies grow bored with comfort. Every path has an end. This is where I came from. It was a museum, even during parties. I didn’t see fire until I saw Darlene.




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skonen_blades: (Default)
The strike hadn’t been effective. They didn’t care about us.

The geothermal shafts went down and down into the earth’s core. Machines took the bulk of the drilling but humans were always needed for cheap grunt work. We were expendable but we dealt with surprises better than the machines.

There’s a feeling that heat-miner gets, for instance, just before a pocket is going to catch. It’s intuition that can’t be matched by a computer.

We’ve been bioengineered to withstand the heat at these depths. Our skin is made of overlapping shingles, heat baffles to dissipate the scalding temperatures. Our bodies are dry inside like sponges and our blood is like molasses. We’re still basically human but we are a breed apart.

It makes it easier to demonize us and treat us badly. We all entered into this nightmare with the idea of high pay.

It turns out that geothermal energy isn’t as cost effective as they led us to believe.

Right now, me and a few of the workers that have been on strike for three weeks are crammed into an elevator.

Curled into a ball on the floor of the elevator is a human supervisor. He’s bleeding and groaning, regaining consciousness. There’s a sock in his mouth and he’s tied up. All of our shoes are pointed towards him. We’re looking down at him with a mixture of fear and anger.

The strike hasn’t been effective. We’ve taken a hostage.

We’ve crossed the line. There’s no doubt that we’ll be fired if not killed for this but hopefully it will bring our plight to the news.

The elevator descends to subsection 126. This is as far as we can legally take a baseline human. We don’t find the heat here very hot but for the human, it’s like being in a pizza oven set to warm, survivable but highly uncomfortable.

At this depth, he can survive for two days. He'll need some supervised re-hydration in a hospital afterwards and probably a new pair of lungs.

We don't feel the heat but we're worried. Our red eyes meet each other’s nervously and our shingles shift and flutter, waffling away the heat. Our slowly beating hearts feel sympathy with the moaning creature on the hot floor of the elevator but we can’t stop now.

We left a note upstairs that for every hour that goes by that our demands are ignored, we will descend another level.

I estimate that we can probably go eight or nine levels before the human’s clothes combust. We have a fire extinguisher here for that.

Another six levels after that, and he’ll be ash.

The radio in our elevator is working but so far, nothing.

I hope they get in touch with us soon.



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skonen_blades: (gimmesommo)
To see my way through dancers in the night, I hold aloft a fuse. A roadside flare that marks off the time I have left, acting as a warning to the nocturnal insects that balk at brightness. This is danger at the roadside marking off the paces to the pirated treasure waiting at the foot of the hill. I dream of candle wax and strangers. I dream of probing eyes and the poison that drips off of the word ‘appointment’.

In twelve weeks, my memory of the future goes cold. After that, it’s the leap of hang-gliding wizards taking shots at dragons in summer skies. After that, it’s necessary bereavement and an amputee race of forgotten hopes against wished-for wishes granted much too late up a hill of happy memories. After that, it’s a dark return to love. Heave against the alarm clock and push it off the cliff.

We will gather together in Calcutta. We will gather together in Rome. We will gather together around the largest volcanic fissure on the bottom of the ocean. We will experience life in the slums of our own hearts and we will experience history in the cobwebbed libraries of our own minds. We will take swimming lessons from bad teachers and forge our own stories across the ocean.

I warm my hands beside your fire, humming a tune to keep myself from remembering how good I feel around you. I have a drawer full of stamps at home, envelopes and paper, but they mystify me. I picture the Earth hurtling through time like a bowling ball and I wonder how it’s possible to not feel it. I think that this, right here, is the granted gift unraveling around us in a celebration of life.

If this is a recipe, then we need more salt. Tears, sweat, and blood. If this is a recipe, then we need more time. Centuries. If this is a recipe, then we need more sugar. Love, hugs, and the end of being hunted.

I’m a tent-pole and it’s raining. Help me be a lightning rod.




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skonen_blades: (cocky)
The hedgehog scientist shuffled over to the oven-incubators and peered through the small circle of safety glass at his burning children. The portal flickered red and yellow. The creatures inside the incubators were too hot for this world.

They were only fetuses at the moment, twisting red weasels made of volatile radioactive flesh. They flickered in the heat haze through the glass. The retardant insulators baffled the heat inside the cylinder.

The incubators were circular and thick. They looked more like furnaces. The furnace hides were pockmarked and ancient-looking from high-temperature premature aging. Heat bled out through the rivets on the portholes and through the giant fanned sheets of metal on the top. There were hundreds of the furnace incubators along the walls of the lab.

This was a ‘hot lab’. It’s where the Salamanders were made.

The scientist, Dr. Rengler when he was human, was what was called a ‘hedghog’. To combat the heat, Rengler had been given a back full of refrigerated radial spines to help keep the heat away from his internals. The spines eventually gave him a stoop that make him peer about. The hundreds of spines poked up, steaming cold in the heat. He resembled a hedgehog to the English bastard scientist who’d invented his genus and the name had stuck.

His job was to check the tanks for irregularities and make notes. In the heat of the room, normal plastics and ink melted. You could forget about paper. He had a proper terminal insulated with layers of heat-retardant molecular spreaders.

If Rengler wanted to write something down, there were small sheets of metal and an etching spike. When he used it, he felt like a caveman using his own version of post-it notes.

He turned back to center of the room to make his hourly check-in assignment. He heard the sound of tinkling glass off to the left.

In a panic, Dr. Rengler spun towards the sound, his spines bristling. What he saw chilled his blood.

One of the Salamaders had its head poking out of one of the chambers. The glass was sizzling on the floor. The Salamander was too fat to get through the porthole and was trying to wiggle through. The hole around him was turning red and melting.

Dr. Rengler thumbed his emergency button and ran for the gloves and the emergency canister off to the left.

The lights went off and then snapped up again to emergency levels.

For that one second while the lights were off, Dr. Rengler the hedgehog saw a tiny, wiggling sun trying to free itself.

He walked forward, protective gear at the ready, and aimed a blast of the cold extinguisher at the beast’s head.



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skonen_blades: (didyoujust)
I weigh six tons and my back is on fire. Walking on these streets brings back a memory.

I remember walking on the thick crust of snow in the arctic. I remember that as a child, I could run across the top of the frozen snow with no worries. As I got older and heavier, I had to walk more carefully in case I broke through the top layer and struggled through the waist-deep powder underneath.

Back when I was human.

I’m in a downtown core now. One foot busts through the deserted street asphalt and punches down into the sewer underneath. I pull it out and step gingerly up onto the street again.

I remember that when I was a teenager in the snow, they gave me snowshoes to stop me from falling through the snow.

I look around at the fires and the bodies and the melting glass of the buildings. There are a couple of cars near to me. I tear their roofs off and step on them. They immediately melt from the heat of my huge feet, attaching themselves to me. Presto. Urban snowshoes.

If my new face would allow it, I would smile.

I’m not responsible for this carnage, I’m just reporting on it. The corporation acted while the governments toppled and stood scared. They grabbed people off the streets and strapped them to beds. The experiments were started.

I’m a firekiln. I’m a walking two-story monster made of brick. I have super-hydrated cameras strapped to me and a transmitter buried in the rock of my forehead to receive directions and relay information back.

I’m like one of those remote control submarines except for radioactive pits instead of the ocean.

I remember paper burning in the fireplace when I was growing up. I remember the paper turning black and then flying up the chimney, red-edged and victim to the thermals.

I’m watching human bodies do that now every time I turn something over or a storefront collapses when I walk past.

The world wavers in a heat haze around me like one giant mirage. This is an oven.

I’ve absorbed too much radiation to go back amongst unaugmented humans but I knew this was a one way trip. There are others like me here reporting back as well and they’ll send more once our cameras dry out and break.

I’ll have friends. We’ll hang out here and see how many years it takes for us to melt.


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