Micro-Fiction

[Steerpike]

Thanks, Drizztrocks.  A lot of these pieces I'm not really satisfied with - they're all awfully low on plot.  I'm a kind of hyper-descriptive writer, pretty purple (I aim for "bruise purple") and I'm sure many find my writing at least a bit pretentious.  I'm great in terms of evoking a scene and I hope to a certain extent characters (even if few of them have well-developed personalities, I hope I sometimes suggest the presence of personalities and interiority).  I'm much worse at concocting narratives, although with the adventure outlines I've been writing for the Cadaverous Earth I'm trying to work on this...

[Numinous]

Artistry is classy, imparting a very vivid sense of the world in which it takes place.  Although I'm not sure why Rowan is not a member of the guild, with his second group of clients seeming more prestigious, the outlaw crafter of perversions is a fantastic image.  Especially with his pretentions of artistry.

The only incongruity I noticed was in the third paragraph.  The nature of the shop is indicated with a neon sign but the antechamber is lit by a gas lamp?  While both provide a distinct flavor, their combination is odd in that it brings up the question of why electricity is used outside but not in?

Anyway, keep it up.  I find your fiction to be delightful and digestible.

[Steerpike]

Thanks!  Made a couple of tweaks.  Perhaps a shallow explaination for his freelance status, but at least a gesture towards his motivation...

[Numinous]

Thanks!  Made a couple of tweaks.  Perhaps a shallow explanation for his freelance status, but at least a gesture towards his motivation...

I'd certainly hate to seem picky, but the new explanation for his freelance status is heavy-handed.  It was better before in ambiguity even.  If I might make a suggestion, it might be better to imply that since his work is so disturbing and/or distasteful, he must operate outside of the Guild to pursue his "art".  Your other fix (for the gas lamp) might be better if changed to "a flickering bare bulb" instead of "fitful lamp" as well.

Just trying to provide some actually useful criticism, no harm intended.

[Steerpike]

Heh tweaked again :).  I'm imagining the guild kind of like a big advertising company.  If you're a member you basically just crank out boring corporate art.  Freelancers risk more but get to do what they like, pick and choose their commissions.

Oh, and if you care for one, please have a Cadaverous Earth review badge:

[Numinous]

[/url]

Don't mind if I do.  Maybe I'll go through the rest of the fiction later, but right now I'm supposed to be planning out the rest of my semester.

[Steerpike]

[ic=Memory]The adventurer is old, grizzled, with dark scars and hair turned prematurely gray. Pistols hang from his belt in leather holsters, and a notched sword leans against the wall, pitted with use, spattered with old stains. His eyes are hardened from a lifetime in the wastes. He draws in a mouthful of smoke from his carved wooden pipe and fills his mind with memories.

He has seen a gruesome myriad of sights, gazed upon vistas of mutilated grandeur, hunted hideous and sometimes eerily beautiful monstrosities across the thousand twisted landscapes of the Slaughter-lands, conversed with corpses and things whose ancestors might once have been men. The Twilight Cities, those vast monuments that reared to stab at the rent and mottled skies, were the most stunning and the most horrifying, in their sheer density of life and death '" ramshackle Lophius with its briny canals and its many malformed little gods; Crepuscle with its carnival confusion of peoples and its bustling thoroughfares; the crazed clockwork and quivering spires of Skein; Moroi with its great tree and its blighted slums, teeming with the mad; the winding market-streets of Baranauskas, ancient beyond reckoning, air thick with the cloy of blood and perfume; the black silence and discordant laughter of Somnambulon; the grim, alien hive of Dolmen with buildings like stony cobwebs. He has tasted each of them in turn and wandered far beyond their walls, from the shores the Fevered Ocean to the wailing rupture of the Suppuration.

His career was long, full of violence and strangeness. With a shade who fought in a suit of enamelled armour and a pair of witches, lovers, whose books brimmed with dark sigils '" a catalogue of death, each eldritch vivisection or evisceration more exotic than the last '" the mercenary had plundered the tombs of the Gengrymar, wiped out in the harrowflux plagues in the final centuries of the Desiccation, before turning to the cliffside mansions of the Uzull along the Serrated Coast, their bejewelled cities long claimed by the tides, leaving only a few seaweed-clad spires and derelict palaces along the broken shores, their marble façades yellowed and eroded. After one of the hexers was snatched by a roaming xsur '" carried off to some distant eyrie to have her bones added to the barbed, leathery creature's nest '" and the other was devoured by a predatory fungus on the outskirts of the southern fens, he and the shade had traveled north, joined the caravan of some blind seeress on her way to the Gaunt City.

They'd trekked through the mutable randomness of the Tallow Plains evading the aggressive, feral architecture, grown wild in that fragmented space, haggling with the half-mad nomads of the region and repelling the occasional waxborn before arriving, at last, at the iron-clad and glyph-etched gates of the city, a place of asylums and vampire machines. He and the shade had parted and he'd headed north with a band of pilgrims bound for the Shrine of Sighing Winds.

On their way they'd passed through a village with huts fashioned from manskin and human bones, ruled by merciless ghilan elders grown corpulent with the flesh of their mortal tribe's sacrifices, sitting in the dark of their macabre hall and gnawing on the remnants of their periodic carrion feasts. Later, aboard a clockwork train heading towards Skein, he'd helped defend their carriage from a group of brigands armed with kukri knives and flintlocks and poisoned scimitars, cruel-faced men in the employ of Red Gregory himself, a gunslinger warlord and a living legend. At the Shrine, awed by the daeva that resided there, he'd briefly become a neophyte, shaved his head and devoted himself to the Mysteries of Shaaltelathiel, learned herbcraft and meditated in the whispering stone gardens for a few months before growing bored with asceticism.

Then, in the shadow of the Slouching-devil Mountains, he'd chased bounties in the narrow gorges and scabrous badlands of the foothills, fought off wolves with tentacled maws and screeching harpy-crows with cherubic human faces, delved into the dank tunnels built by gigantic and long-dead architects. With a trio of hunters '" a droll axeman with brooding eyes, a lilix pistolier, and a sarcastic swordsmen from the City of the Lamprey '" he'd wandered eastwards towards the lands around the Sinew River, then north into Barrow Scrub. Here, in one of the subterranean ruins of the defunct cestoid Imperium, a surreal maze like the bowels of some enormous nightmare-creature, they'd joined a party of zealous Striga-worshippers to eradicate a cult of the wormfolk and their foolish human followers who'd been gutting the kidnapped children of a nearby settlement, spilling blood on the foul altar of the Ravager Worm. Later, pallid and weary with the sapping blanchphage of Etiolation, he'd glimpsed the petrified god itself, the great stone corpse of the god-leech Hirud '" or so some claimed.

His travels brought him south, eventually, towards the frontier of Dour Erg. In an impromptu duel over a hand of cards in some dilapidated saloon he'd killed three men in cold blood and fled the justice of the thugs who ran the town, was caught, escaped, nearly died of thirst before crawling through the Butcher's Gate of the Maggot City. After recovering from his ordeal he became a thief, picking pockets and breaking into storehouses with a rookery of men and women in Resurrection Row.

Later, jaded with such petty parasitism, he'd signed on with a Robber Guild and, for a time, worked with a callous ghul cutthroat-antiquarian and his hulking, stitch-work servitor, an obedient hunchbacked horror with piston-driven limbs and the grafted tail of a giant scorpion. Together they'd plumbed the ruins of the Second Tsathii Republic, drowned in the Red Ravishing, and the old, shattered kingdoms of Voldanc, destroyed by the Scourge Armies during the Membrane Wars, their castle-cities of Scrutatos and Vertegrazze left to crumble slowly into dust. Only the servants of the Voldanc masters remained, elementals bound to eternal servitude, endlessly repeating now meaningless chores in the empty manors of their creators, ignoring the mercenary and his companions as they gathered those few artefacts untouched by prior looters. A pack of fetch had torn the ghul limb from limb on the lonely trail back to Baranauskas, the murderfolk swarming over the grave-spawn's creation. The adventurer ran into the glowering dusk and killed all that pursued him, clutching the grimoire of a court warlock to his chest. He returned to thieving, took up with the leader of the rookery, an icy and ruthless woman who broke his heart and cast him out of the city.

He headed further south, back towards the swamps, fleeing love and death and memories, though all followed him as doggedly as Screamwood hounds. He sought comfort first with the courtesans of Per-Bashti, then with the gods of the Driftwood District. He became a priest again, this time to an aspirant insect-headed godling, but the deity's shrine was ransacked by rival fanatics and he returned to his former profession.

Briefly he ran with a swordsman-poet, a hagman outcast, and a warrior-monk, tracking down leechkin who'd succumbed to the thirst in the sweltering, demon-haunted murk of the swamps. They dispersed when work grew infrequent and he joined the Pale Legion, a mercenary company based in Crepuscle drawn south by skirmishes between merchants selling to the zerda and the voracious mantid tribes of the Firesong Marches. He fought in a dozen battles and rose to the rank of corporal before being discharged for drunkenness in the City of Red and Black.

He exhales. The memories blur together, but one disjointed chapter of a long and bloody story...[/ic]

[LD]

[ic=The Last Voyage of Unnameable]The ether-craft Unnameable squirmed through the tenebrous nether-dimensions of hyperspace, boring through the membranes of reality like some gigantic worm, its cannonry dangling from its bulk like ganglia, the black globule of its cockpit staring into the abyss like some huge and monstrous eye. Deep within the ship, past layers of hull and shielding, Captain James Howard was cleaning his guns meticulously with an oil-rag. They lay disassembled on the scarred wooden table, each component carefully positioned, gleaming in the sputtering overhead gaslight. Suddenly Unnameable shifted, lurching in hyperspace: probably the eldritch resonance of some massive object in real space, radiating into the ether. The vessel bucked; the precisely laid-out bits and pieces Howard had so painstakingly arrayed rolled off the table and clattered to the dull iron floor. An alarm blared discordantly over the ship's speaker-system.

...

'It's not turbulence Captain, something just hit the ship! I think you'd better come up here and take a look at thi '"'

The radio was dead: no screams, no garbled raving, just a burst of static and then silence. Howard banged the voxiferator against the wall, snarled Pnoth's name. No response. The rest of the ship was equally silent.

He reached down to his belt to draw a gun that wasn't there, swore when he realized that all his weapons were lying in pieces on the armoury floor. He crept down the corridor, staring at the hexagonal door at the far end that led to the bridge.

He made it halfway down the passage when the door hissed open. The creature that stood framed in the doorway was a thing out of a nightmare: gaunt and leathery, glowing with sallow, hideous light. How it had gotten into the ship he had no idea. In one clawed hand its clutched a gnawed limb; its maw dripped blood and black spittle on the floor. It shambled now towards him, and its eyeless face filled his vision'¦[/ic]

>>'Pnoth, what the hell am I paying you for you mangy maggot-ridden '"'
'It's not turbulence Captain, something just hit the ship! I think you'd better come up here and take a look at thi '"'

Abrupt. The ending didn't seem as well set up as I would have expected.

Also, I would have appreciated more to the story... But considering its title I suppose I should be able to assume how it ended.

"Cleaning his guns" what sort of guns? Energy? Pistols?

Do I sense some Firefly influence with the engineer-lady?

--
It seems like Hubris could have been expanded a little more as well.

I enjoy the imagery and the set up... but it seems like the stories could have used a little more resolution in some cases and fulfillment in some others. Hubris reads very much like a White Wolf book introductory chapter; which is good and bad. It is good because it gets published, so obviously people like this style. It is bad because well, it seems to "lack" something that is hard to place one's finger on.

Still, I am not certain if the story should be changed. I considered suggesting that the fight last longer, but that might cause the scene to lose some of its immediacy. But what if something a bit more could be done to explain Iccelus? Perhaps some details could come out about his past- a friend in the crowd maybe who is just as arrogant... and then to contrast Iccelus' hubris the friend slinks away defeated? I am uncertain.

I enjoy your writing as always.

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Thanks very much for the comments.

The guns were meant to be revolvers.  Its the intro to Spaceships/Sixguns/Cyclopean Horrors which was my attempt at a Lovecraftian Space Western, sort of Lovecraft meets Firefly.  I agree the ending is too abrupt.

Hubris does read rather like a piece of game-book fiction... its flawed, I'll readily admit.  I wanted a sense of build-up, this big epic fight with a very dramatic scene, and then an ironic, sudden, dakly humorous end as a kind of deflation, like this.  The problem is that its in danger of just falling flat and dissapointing the reader; I'm not sure I pulled off the effect properly (perhaps its just easier to do with film).

A lot of my smaller pieces feel unresolved, or too abruptly resolved.  I'm rather happy with the semi-abrupt ending in "The Nyx."  Really what I should do is move on to slightly longer stories... I'm fairly pleased with "Vanity," for example, though it's so disturbing that I creep myself out reading it.  Partly the vignettes are meant to be tastes of my settings, but all to often, to me, they feel like inchoate, aborted versions of longer stories.[/ooc]

[LD]

Hmm... You definitely achieved the sudden ending. I do not know how ironic it was- I think that is because I was uncertain who is supposed to be the hero. Usually the human being would be the hero; but he came across as a bigot, which in today's literature might cast him as an antagonist, so I experienced some cognitive dissonance, I think. I was actually sort of rooting for the Ghul (But I might be in the minority of your readers on that point.)

I will have to check out some of the other shorts.

Well, the stories accomplish their goal of giving flavor to your settings and establishing a taste that the readers can enjoy-- so congratulations on that.

I think it seems that you are good at establishing a world and a mood. What would be nice is if in your stories you could build characters too. The regrettable problem with building characters though is that takes a lot of words and a lot of pages and time... But you are an english major, so I would suspect you might relish the challenge of creating really interesting and intriguing characters who can grow and evolve and change in a small space.

I think that is what leads to a sort of reader-disconnect from some of the vignettes, there is very little to grasp on to and to identify with.

They are enjoyable, just a little vacant because of the focus on mood. But for what they do- establish the mood of your setting- they certainly accomplish that!

[Steerpike]

[ic=Piety]Far below the palaces of obsidian and black marble of the tower-city's upper tiers Talviir stirred from his rude repose in a lavishly carved niche, a forgotten sepulcher in the necropolitan slum of Chenzirr, Dolmen's lowest and poorest level.  It was almost like awakening in a cave, in some troglodytic warren.  Above him the early morning sky was dulled with a film of cobwebs and cables and brown smoke from the factories of Xelschemyr, a tier above.  The worn stone streets of Chenzirr were perpetually clad in shadow: from the city's high stone walls, from the tall, narrow buildings, from the spires that rose above, from the jagged Chelicerae Mountains that loomed oppressively behind the city.  Even at noon most of the district's light was artificial, derived from strings of lamps hung high above the streets or from the hellish glow of the cavernous furnaces below, visible through the occasional grates and spiral stairways leading to the slave-pens and flesh kitchens beneath the city.

Talviir stretched his seven limbs, his phantom arm (middle, left) itching, as it always did when he first arose.  It marked him as a spider-killer, a criminal.  Next to the ugly scar on his torso, his missing hand (upper, left) '" taken for thieving in the opulent markets of Juszyryn '" seemed a petty absence, a common stigma dwarfed by the enormous blasphemy that a missing arm signified.  Both mutilations placed him firmly in the bottom caste of the lilix, reserved for heretics, traitors, sexual deviants, and similar transgressors.  He was gholmuz.  Unsightly.  Abject.  Polluted One.  Shame-Bearer.  Few of the spiderfolk bore such a designation: the lilix were an aristocratic race who knew little of poverty, served as they were by swarms of human slaves.  Those who were truly poor were mostly outcasts like him, shunned from the higher levels.  If he wandered into the well-lit, luxurious dioceses of Malofneshee or even Illhillisz he would be beaten away by the liveried footmen of the matriarchs, or the masked neophyte guardswomen of Verlum's more impressive temples.

He moved now using only his legs; there were no priestesses or high-bloods in this part of the diocese, whose presence would force him to adopt the formal scuttling posture appropriate to his caste, emphasizing his shame, the awkwardness of his severed limb.  He looked about for something to scrounge, eight crimson eyes squinting in the thick grey gloom.

Though the city's intricate sewers deposited most of Dolmen's filth to be incinerated in some unseen oubliette or emptied into a subterranean river far below, much of the upper tiers' waste found its way to Chenzirr instead, sluiced through broken pipes to slosh into the gutters; as a result the entire tier was infested with rats and flies and similar creatures.  One such scavenger scurried down a side-alley '" an albino rat, scrawny but large, creeping along in the narrow gap between two tall structures, tombs-cum-warehouses, grown shabby over the centuries of lilix occupation.  Talviir summoned as much speed as his aching body could muster and darted forwards, his remaining hands flickering out with nimbleness acquired from his former profession.  Gone were the days of sparring and shooting in the martial academies of Chaulaxna, teaching pupils '" even women '" the ways of blade and pistol; but some of his former agility remained, diminished through years of hard living.

Two of his hands closed about the rat, the others landing on the flagstone street to steady him.  The rodent squealed; he twisted its neck, merciless, and the rat went limp.  Famished he began his meal, sucking foul-tasting blood from the corpse.  Meager nourishment, but enough to sustain him.

As Talviir drank he noticed a huge, stray spider picking its way daintily across a massive, silvery web above him.  He threw the rat into the webbing; there wasn't much blood left, but the spider would turn its flesh and bones to fluid with its venomous enzymes, and Verlum would look favorably on such a sacrifice.  The goddess could be merciful, if you appeased her children '" perhaps even to one such as him.[/ic]

[LD]

Talviir stretched his seven limbs, his phantom arm (middle, left) itching, as it always did when he first arose. It marked him as a spider-killer, a criminal. Next to the ugly scar on his torso, his missing hand (upper, left) '" taken for thieving in the opulent markets of Juszyryn '" seemed a petty absence, a common stigma dwarfed by the enormous blasphemy that a missing arm signified.

Few of the spiderfolk bore such a designation: the lilix were an aristocratic race who knew little of poverty, served as they were by swarms of human slaves.[/quote]As Talviir drank he noticed a huge, stray spider picking its way daintily across a massive, silvery web above him. He threw the rat into the webbing; there wasn't much blood left, but the spider would turn its flesh and bones to fluid with its venomous enzymes, and Verlum would look favorably on such a sacrifice. The goddess could be merciful, if you appeased her children '" perhaps even to one such as him.[/quote]
This is a very well done vignette. I think this is one of your best.
~LD.

[Steerpike]

Thanks, Light Dragon!  And I agree about "some" here - I removed one instance of it.

[Steerpike]

[ic=Splenitive and Rash]'Have you had an emulation drawn up?'  Fitzgerald asked abruptly, as our pod approached The Quintessence of Dust.

'No.  Preparing a persona upload would be dishonourable.'  I shot a dark glance at him.  'Are you insinuating I might lose?'

'Christian's sword is as sharp as your own,' my second responded.  'He is said to be skilled.  I heard it claimed he was taught by one of the old Aldebaran masters, whom the natives say forge contracts with demons to purchase their skills.'

'The natives probably believed Christian himself was a demon,' I said, unwrapping a capsule of Incroyable!, a reflex-enhancer.  'They're primitives, Fitz: slaves to the most outrageous sorts of magical thought.  I've no time for superstitious babble, I've got a duel to win.'  I could feel the drug sharpen my senses, heighten my awareness, the speed of my reactions.

'Have you at least made up your will?'

'Don't be absurd.  You know I haven't.'

'If you were killed, the squabble would be insufferable.'

'The heirs would all make an appearance; things would sort themselves out.'

'I wish I shared your optimism.  The family would fall to bickering over the phantom-bombs.'

'Those dusty old relics?  I doubt anyone would have any interest; they've probably decayed past use by now anyway, like wine turning to vinegar.'

'I forget that you never read physics, Julian.  The half-lives of those isotopes are such that they won't degenerate for millennia yet.  In the absence of a formal will your cousin Edward and even some of the Fairfaxes could make a claim.'

'Well, there's no point in fretting now, it's far too late to do anything about.'

'They'll have prepared conditions: you could probably get off by issuing a formal apology.'

'What, withdraw and slink away with my tail between my legs?  I think not.'

There was a gentle clunk as our pod docked with The Quintessence of Dust.  I strapped on my blade and the pair of us made our way down the connexive corridor, into a broad parlor.  The walls were paneled in teak and rosewood; paintings depicting members of House Typhoeous lined the chamber, staring down with the smoldering eyes and grim expressions characteristic of the clan.  The blackness of the void could be seen through a narrow porthole.  A gentleman and a servitor awaited us by the window, along with a small ocelot spliced with orchid-genes such that its coat displayed a variety of vivid, almost monstrous patterns.  The feline purred luxuriously, twining itself about the servitor's brass legs.

'Sherry, gentlemen?'  The robot asked, proffering a tray of drinks.  'Or perhaps some other refreshment?  The synthesizer has a large range of victuals; the salmon roe are particularly delectable, we went to great lengths to acquire a pure terran code '"'

'Nothing, thank you,' I cut off the unctuous automaton.  Alcohol was out of the question, and I didn't trust anything else they prepared; though the use of poison would of course incur great dishonour, there were a number of substances classifiable as flavour-enhancers, and thus not technically considered venomous in the code duello, which could nonetheless be detrimental to my fighting abilities. I doubted Christian would stoop that low, but he did have a reputation for cunning.  'I'd prefer to get this over with '" if that is amenable.'

'Of course.'  The gentleman spoke, a pallid man with a wispy moustache and eyes that seemed older than his slight frame and unlined features suggested.  'If you'll come this way, we've prepared the green.'  He gestured with a manicured hand.

The green was immaculate '" I had to at least give Christian credit for that.  Realistic holo-tapestries covered the walls, giving the impression of a high mountain clearing a dawn.  I inhaled; the air had been thinned, to lend further verisimilitude to the illusion.  The artificial gravity was slightly higher than the terran standard.

'Christian used to fight on mountaintops,' Fitzgerald whispered.  'To improve his stamina.  Still going to refuse their conditions?'

'Craven!  You're supposed to be my second, not my mother,' I whispered back, just as Christian swaggered in.  He was garbed all in satin and furs he said were the pelts of alien beasts he hunted on some far-flung world past Betelgeuse, though I suspected they were convincing synthetic copies '" the clever bastard probably obtained an authentic code for them, like the precious caviar the servitor had been bragging about.  He favored me with a cruel, calculating sort of look that he'd probably practiced in a mirror for hours.

Behind him came the Lady Darlington Typhoeous '" Christian's second cousin, and a superb specimen of womanhood.  She wore a startlingly plain white dress, accented with strings of black pearls and polished ebony bracelets and choker; she carried a small, peacock-feathered fan despite the simulated morning chill.  I caught her eye; she gave me a small, demure smile and looked away, snapping open her fan to conceal what I hoped was a blush.

'Gentlemen,' the pale fellow said.  'By having both demonstrated your willingness to fight, you have discharged any dishonour you might have incurred and may thus, if you agree, end this dispute in an amicable fashion.  What say you both?'

'I am ready to let the matter drop,' said Christian matter-of-factly, shrugging his shoulders.  'Provided, of course, that you yield to my terms.'

I snarled and prepared to spit a retort but Fitz held me back.  'What are your conditions?'

Christian smiled.  'You need merely retract your insult and issue a formal apology over the public channel'¦'

'I think not, my dear fellow.'  I contained my anger, quieting the rage that throbbed inside me, lest Lady Darlington draw unfortunate conclusions.  'I will have satisfaction.'

'Very well.'

'Both parties are clear on the rules?'  The gentleman asked.  'The duel will be strictly to the death; the weapons are blades.'  We both nodded in comprehension and stepped onto the green; the piste itself was a narrow strip demarcated with small, dew-mottled lights.  The servitor moved into position to one side: it was customary for a program to judge a bout, since they could follow even the fastest flurry of blows with greater accuracy than any human, and held the entire database of fencing rules on hand.

I drew my blade from my swordcane; it hummed in the still air of the spacecraft.  Like Christian's own sabre the weapon had a monomolecular edge: if I were so inclined I could plunge it halfway through the ship's inner hull without breaking the blade.  Of course such an edge decayed almost immediately, but even so the sword remained incredibly sharp; though the chemical lattice of either blade ensured that they could still parry one another, a well-timed hit could end the match in an instant.

I saluted Christian and the judge; my opponent did the same, smirking and smoothing back his dark curls with a contemptuous gesture.

'En garde,' the servitor intoned.  'Allez!'[/ic]

[Steerpike]

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