(reading time: 1 hour, 11 minutes)
Dinosaur
The tip had come to Lindwurm from a trilophosaur, and so was taken with the utmost seriousness. No family was more devoted to the cause than the trilophosaurs, even across their many species. Most of them were forever cut off from man, unable to experience their appreciation across the gulf of time, because few of their fossils would ever be found, and when they were they were not representative. Continue reading
Only finding fossils, we never suspected the flesh of the dinosaurs could’ve been so strange, could’ve climbed off whenever it felt like it and even borrowed our shape. That is the forgotten clade thanazoa, but they know of us, thanks to communing with their fungus-like oracle Atropos.
A defeated villain resurfaces to abuse those predictions, her predatory eyes set on the future she thinks she is denied. Discover a brand new world on familiar bones in this wildly speculative novella of the Triassic period.
(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 2 hours, 24 minutes)
Taxa Disaster
by
Blaine Arcade
‘Even if, one day, we had access to perfectly preserved fossils, a vital aspect of animal life would still elude our grasp. Behavior is almost entirely lost in the fossil record. Imagine the richness and strange wonder of animal life today. The eerie, ululating songs of whales, the elaborate middens of bowerbirds and the surreal spectacle of a peacock’s display could never be deduced from inanimate remains.
Likewise, some of the most spectacular sights of the past will never be seen, or even guessed.’
– All Yesterdays
Centipede
The insects were reluctant to touch it, and that reluctance continued on down to everything that could be called life. The fungi refused to take the first bite. The bacteria self-destructed rather than continue touching it for more than a moment. It was as if they knew what kind of will had inhabited it just one day prior. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes)
Münstereifel was the forest where one couldn’t help but feel watched. Despite the stodgy old growth being stuffed into a pocket of Germany, the sensation was not like being a grim fairy tale child wandering between dark trees with glowing beastly eyes all about. No, the eyes were far more ethereal, and for Kanga more frightening. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 26 minutes)
A dark cloud would be just one more uncomfortable bump on any transoceanic flight, but the pilot and copilot couldn’t see it or detect it with their instruments. Even the normal filters of first class team recycling travel, which kept out the riff and for a minor additional fee the raff as well, could do nothing against this particular phenomenon. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 31 minutes)
The night sky was beautiful, almost nauseatingly so. There was purple, orange, and blue in great drifting clouds. Nebulae, but they were supposed to be impossible to see from Earth. The Milky Way was there, under them, everything out of place but rapturously so, the celestial bodies nuzzling each other like puppies in a pile. Continue reading
Y2K threatened to destroy the world, all computers to go mad when the year ticked over to 2000, but a solution was found! Now the nineties play over and over again, and things just keep getting better! The guns are off the streets, the ozone hole is patched, the cops are tough on drugs, and competitive recycling is the number one sport in the world.
Life should’ve been perfect for one of its star players, Joey ‘Kanga’ Reuben, but after his best friend was taken from him in the middle of a match he could think of nothing else. It was all the work of those superhuman terrorists, the dastardly Millennials…
(reading time: 1 hour, 6 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 5 hours, 16 minutes)
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Competitive Recycling in the Fifth 1990s
by
Blaine Arcade
With a robotically chauffeured limousine and enough free soda to raise the Titanic from the depths, nobody could call it a young man’s average Friday night. It was to be the fantastic Friday night characteristic of the reborn Rockford Rendezvous, and this trial run would culminate with the latest tour stop of the sexiest and most fashionable hologram to ever grace the stage and the drifting dust in the beams of the spotlight. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 49 minutes)
The Deal
The entrance to Peako Dagyvr’s workshop, deep in the stony crevasse of Crosstahl, was sealed off in a most unusual manner. The original door was gone, its frame filled by uneven stones that were held together by a bright, almost luminous, blue adhesive. This barrier had a weak spot, an eye drifting in the adhering slime, but it kept on the interior side. That meant it had to watch everything happening within, occasionally dodging a dagger as it was tossed across the chamber.
Even in the relatively short time since Captain Rob had taken the new recruit Alast there to purchase a weapon, Peako’s output had increased significantly. The walls had always had very little empty space, with shields, spears, and war forks hung everywhere, some even modified into braziers to light the place. It was much more cluttered now, the space shrunk by shields overlapping, like the dermal disorder of a scaly beast. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 21 minutes)
Age of Tragedy
The Captain still expected to thwart more would-be assassins, but his next trip to Platone was peaceful. If only the same could be said for the contents of that trip. He embraced Vyra again, and they walked along a new edge as the ekapads came to crackling life. A new ringing tone played, its shattering volume nothing compared to the godly words that used Vyra’s throat as vessel. The Age of Wonder was lost to time, most of its revelations new to Rob, but the time that followed, the Age of Tragedy, contained some tales that were all too familiar.
These were things that could never be denied: acts of destruction so complete that they could only ever be the end or the foundation of something new. The shattering of both the tiles and the Reflecting Path. The mildew plague. The decimation and retreat of the prosites. These all had a common cause. Porce could not be the paradise it once was, and all because of a single wanderer intrigued by the peace of Youbend. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 8 minutes)
Age of Wonder
A concert of Platone lit up the night sky in shocking red and swollen purple. Ekapads stampeded across its face in lightning arcs like blazing stars fired from bows. The din and its associated powers were enough to kill a lightfolk in three different ways, but Vyra was protected by the divine powers of Hesprid, and her prosite stowaway by the same from Qorcneas. There was a bubble around them that the lightning broke up against, sizzling across its surface like fuzzy seeds tumbling down a rock face.
For a while she walked the empowered stone with Captain Rob, who had dutifully returned. With no flesh to burn he too was safe, but his gaze was drawn to her far more than the chaotic lights and sounds all around. Somehow when she spoke he heard, with no need to shout over the concert. He heard because the first gods willed it so, from all the way below the world in their graves. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 21 minutes)
Without Love Waxxon
The Captain deliberately chose to not look back much after leaving Platone with the curator screaming upon his back. He wanted to watch his first concert of dancing ekapads with Vyra, so he kept his sockets aimed forward all the way back to Tonefoot and the Chokechain. He could not shut out the ringing tone itself however.
Never a student of music, the pirate still heard several classical pieces in the simplified melody, realizing for the first time how the borrowed backbone fit into each composition. All of the flourish, all the different instruments, were certainly necessary, for the ringing tone was horrifically grating to him. Worse still, he was no longer capable of effectively covering his ears now that there were no fleshy lobes to squish against the side of his head and no cupping palms to create calmer pockets. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 