skonen_blades

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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Because it’s tabula rasa here
The rain washes all the chalkboards clean
Ready for new instructions
Blank slates
Because we’re all actors here in Hollywood North
Pretending that equity is worth something valuable
Vacant stares and vacant homes
While the surf licks the cold sand
And restaurants grow and fail and grow again
like weeds with heartbeats
A rainforest haze throws a blanket on us
The kind of pine-scented dampness
That makes sure that anything untended rots
Everything turns to rust and mulch here
Stolen bikes are currency
The drunk man on the bus tells me
that we have never gone back to the moon
Because of capitalism
And that a person should be valued for what they are
Not what they have
And I can’t disagree
Because while there is reality and then there is fiscal reality
We can't seem to set our sights on anything good
The days slosh into one another here
There is only one damp circular path of days
I’m grateful to be here
When the rain calms me down
And tells me to be quiet and listen
But I can feel our intrusion
Our right angles
Our banishment of a nature that wants to envelop us
I feel the forest’s confusion that we don’t want to be included
I like knowing that if we died tomorrow
That our buildings would grow moldy and weak
And collapse into ivy-covered piles of rubble
More quickly than in other parts of the world
I like it here
And I’m thankful for the rain


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There used to be a trail
Through the woods
A shortcut I took often as a child
A shortcut I reveled in
A shortcut I made long in my memory
Long with dawdling, running, swinging from branches, climbing.
Deviating off the grid in transit
A right turn off the street through some bushes and through into
Emerald trees jungling thickly with summer, translucent leaves dappling sunlight through a thousand feathering gateways, letting almost no light touch the ground
Multicolored patchwork autumn fireworks, stinking of death and rot but somehow more alive that ever.
Through quiet black fingers reaching up through winter's white ground, my footfalls muffled into silence
And spring's teases of young life exploring renewal

There used to be a trail here
And now it's gone
Now, at this spot, it's only forest by the road and there is no path
Overgrown with disuse
Or maybe I just can't
See it
Anymore



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The craft smoked in afternoon sun. The hunter was no judge of aircraft but this strange ship looked damaged beyond repair. Trees lay flat behind it where it had crashed to the ground in the forest. Its silver shell winked in the sunlight, shuddering occasionally as whatever machinery inside of it quaked to a wounded stop. The hunter had seen nothing like it, not even on the newsfeeds. Maybe a new kind of experimental ship that had crash landed but the nearest air force or army base was thousands of miles away.

The hunter was forced to entertain the possibility that this was a ship of alien origin. Setting his jaw firmly and readjusting the grip on his rifle, he stepped forward towards the silent craft. The forest started to come alive again. The violence of the craft’s crash landing had ended. Squirrels resumed foraging, deer resumed grazing, and birds began their songs anew. The ship’s hull ticked as it cooled. The film of frost that had formed on it started to melt in the sun.

The ship lay broken. Through the largest crack in the dripping hull, the hunter could hear movement. A whispering shuffle that ended with a clank. The hunter knew the sound of a wounded animal when he heard it. He advanced to the crack with his rifle ready. The alien inside the craft might was probably close to death or stunned. The hunter walked slowly and softly towards the crack and peered into the gloom.

A silver whip of corded metal shot out from the crack and skated across the hunter’s cheek, laying it open. The hunter’s hands tensed in surprise and he emptied both barrels of the shotgun into the crack. A shower of sparks from buckshot ricochets lit up the interior for a second and the hunter clearly saw the alien life form.

It was like a metal octopus with many more tentacles. The tip of each tentacle ended in a specialized tip. The hunter had shot directly into its center of mass. The creature thrashed and lay still. It was a lucky shot. If the creature had integral organs there, it was almost certainly dead.

The hunter’s cheek buzzed. His right eye closed. He dropped his rifle. There was something in the cut that the alien had made on his face! The hunter’s immediate thought was poison. He felt his heart race and a fever take over his body. He fell to his knees and the sun seemed to get brighter. His breathing came hot and fast. He passed out.

When he awoke, he felt refreshed. He brought his hand up to his cheek to find it healed. He felt the ridge of a scar. Judging by the position of the sun, it looked like about an hour had passed. He stood up, picked up his rifle and went back to his cabin. In the morning, he’d go into town and report what he had found. Right now, though, he was exhausted and thirsty.

It didn’t occur to him until he got back to his cabin that he knew exactly how to build a metal octopus and spaceship. Chemistry beyond his education unspooled in his mind. Mechanical processes popped through his mind. He’d need to invent the tools needed to create the compounds necessary to make the chemical chain reactions that would result in the hardest bonds in the new metal. There were no names for what he was thinking about, just clarity and pictures. The memories of the alien life form were there as well. He couldn’t access them but he knew they were there in a corner of his mind, waiting for download into the shell he now had the ability to create.

It would take six years and it would make him rich if he kept the goal of his projects secret. The patents would change the history of Earth.

The hunter looked at the mirror in the cabin’s bathroom as he prepared for bed. The scar on his cheek was silver.




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It was running through the forest towards them.

Jenny pushed her child, ten-year old Thomas, behind her. Whatever was coming would have to get through her first.

After the divorce, she’d tried her best to take over as both father and mother to her son. This camping trip was another attempt at doing something ‘masculine’ with him. She’d taught him how to fix cars and was debating on whether or not to take him hunting next year. She’d read books on male development and was trying her best to make him strong and hard like a man should be.

It wasn’t working.

Ever since she’d kicked out his father, Thomas had resented her. Also, he’d developed an interest in dance. Last week, he’d openly cried in front of her. She couldn’t slap him and tell him to ‘man up’. That wasn’t her job. She held him close until he stopped, feeling helpless. There wasn’t exactly a huge dating pool in her small town and she’d moved here to get away from the city. She didn’t want to go back, especially if it was just to find a husband. It sounded pathetic to her own ears.

She wasn’t even that lonely. It was all about Thomas.

There were lots of forests around their small town. Thomas liked the outdoors so she’d taken up hiking with him. Keep him in shape, put him out with nature, show him the brutal circle of life out there, she thought. Let him see some dead animals. Give him something he could smell and touch instead of just something watched on television.

Now, though, she was re-considering her stance.

Something was running towards them, snapping branches in a mad dash. It sounded like it could be a bear. She could see trees quivering now in amongst the forest in front of her. It’d be here in less than a second. The sound was deafening.

It ripped right through the tree in front of them like the Tasmanian Devil in the old Looney Tunes.

It was bigger than a full-grown bear but it was bright blue and hairless. It was like a Volkswagen come to life with the head of a demon. All teeth with eight orange eyes shining brightly like a spider. Its back was covered in stiff, quivering, bright green spines like a porcupine. It had mandibles on either side of its dog-like jaws. Its four-legged body was pure muscle, like ten olympic weightlifters had been stitched together to make something massive and grotesque. It must have weighed two tons.

It barreled to a skidding stop in front of them. Pine needles, bark chunks, and the stink of a slaughterhouse pounded forth from its sudden braking, peppering Thomas and Jenny.

And then it talked.

“Quick! You have to run! You have to get away! They’ll kill you!” it said to them in oddly-accented English. It was bleeding purple blood.

Its nostrils flanged and its eyes opened wide. It looked behind itself and with a whine and a thunderous shredding of the ground, it jumped away from where they were standing. It ran off to the left, knocking over trees loudly as it went.

“Go!” it shouted over its shoulder. “It’s me they want! I’ll lead them this way. RUN!”

Jenny picked up Thomas with a strength she didn’t know she had and ran for her life.

In the forest behind them, she heard the sounds of electric crackling and a howl that pierced her heart.

She ran all the way back to their car, got in, and left their camping gear behind as she peeled out and headed for town.

No more camping trips, she thought.



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