The Well of Mimir

I was barely seventeen when I decided to cross the black deserts of the Kai and brave the deadly midnight dunes of Kirrel, said to be full of lying ghosts and hungry, vile beasts.

No longer a child, dressed now in sacred star-patterned robes of blue and white worn by the men of the Kaihk, my parents wept as I left with all I owned upon my back — and little it was. But there was nothing more they could do but curse and weep at my foolishness, for I was a man and they could no longer protect me from my dreams.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dilbert has a problem.

But it’s one he doesn’t know he has.

Dilbert doesn’t care about science-fiction.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thirteenth-Jaguar-Sun did not like the smell that lingered in the air.

It was like the smell of the great temple fires that burned at the foot of the temples to Child-of-the-Bloody-Moons when the winds shifted and blew their black smoke down over the city: it was the charnel smell of flesh taken by flame, the smell of sacrifice, of bodies given over to the eternal fires by the priests.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following is a handwritten scrap torn from a journal. It is unattributed.

There are colors dancing in the darkness that no one can percieve. Tonight, only, I saw the deeper blackness drawing all things into it and shied away from depths blacker than space, blacker than the caverns beneath the Earth.

Read the rest of this entry »

The red-orange haze of the far horizon as it curved away north and south bled into the pink-and-white of the sky, the sun boiling red and angry hot in the sky above like a drop of shimmering crimson blood on the flesh of the air.

And near the edges of the sky, separated from each other by celestial arcs, hung three small objects: two were pale white and washed out in the brightness of the daytime sky, lumpy and irregular, their shadows the color of the sky. The third was little more than a metallic glimmer in the heavens, though its brightness would grow in intensity as dusk approached. These were the three moons.

Read the rest of this entry »

He was a spark of consciousness in the machine, a glimmering pinpoint of brilliant light wrapped in tubes of dark, cold emptiness and lifeless metal. But he was an important spark. He was the heart of the mechanical beast drifting through the black universe.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the ancient, forgotten days reduced and twisted over the aeons into fragments of myth and legend, there was once an empire that stretched along the base of the mountains of Sirral, whose tall, beautiful people built incredible temples to the stars.

These lost people were said to be giants, twice the height of men, with fair skin like unblemished marble, marked by strong and pleasing features, and deep eyes like the color of the blue night sky. But their children were nothing of the sort: tall, but stunted, strong, but twisted, with ugly features and evil black eyes, and flawed, jaundiced skin.

Read the rest of this entry »

Clouds of insects buzzed like thick clouds in the air as we rode up to the grassy, yellowed hill. The white sun burned down upon us from the cloudless blue sky above. The heat was oppressive and dry.

A rocky, winding path led between the craggy hills of dry grass and dusty stone. We followed it around the side of another of the nondescript hills, this one courted by a large pile of broken stones resting upon its side…except our passage by revealed this hill wasn’t so nondescript after all.

Read the rest of this entry »

He sat upon a shelf of rounded stone exposed among the verdant grasses of the hillside, staring up at the pulsing flickers of quiet lighting chasing one another through the clouds and painting the sky with an ever-shifting series of unfocused light and dark shapes.

The light show had been going on for hours without a single cry of thunder, just the light filling up the heavens in broad, bright sheets, nearly drowning the swaths of stars that shone through the tattered and oft-broken canopy.

Read the rest of this entry »

…After the Wars of Extinction, the Cleansing Wars, the Champions of Rajaat became the all-powerful sorcerer-monarchs of Athas, overthrowing their master when it was found that they, too, would become victims of his desire to return Athas to the near-mythical Blue Age…

“So, do you think we did the right thing?”

“Destroying the world?”

They looked out upon the barren dust, the heaped corpses their armies were piling onto a massive, smoking funeral pyre downwind. Carelessly tossing bodies of comrades and enemies alike onto the blazing, stinking pile. The billowing black column of greasy smoke could be seen for miles. Centuries ago, such a scene might have disturbed either of them.

Read the rest of this entry »