animals

Grab (part one)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 9 Comments

Hunt with your bare hands!  This is the world of grabbling, where the mightiest warriors in the land equip themselves with wildlife by ramming their arms down various throats and making them into weapons.  Delve deep underground in this low fantasy epic where the grabbler Beocroak, sole survivor of a petty bloodbath, must battle his way out of a rising ghostly city capitalizing on all that foolish subterranean death.  Should he make it out of that cavernous grave, there is still the harsh world beyond, of Goodly and ghastly gods, of giant floating eyes watching your every move, and of sinister curses illuminated by green witchfire.

Grab

by

Blaine Arcade

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 22 minutes) (time for entire novel: 10 hours, 44 minutes)

Curse

Bound in hide, scorch-writ on wood, death diverse and plenty harvested this tome from the minds and lore of men. Safe and content it sits upon the owner’s shelf, in the author’s legacy. You are a guest in its pages. Do not smudge with your fingers. Do not mar with your drool. This is a meal for the soul, so do not eat or drink near it to avoid damage.

If you are unwelcome, if your eyes be thieves of words, know that you are cursed when these contents leave the shelf, lose their blanket of dust, and are not properly and primly returned. This curse has fingers that can touch in different ways. Should you abscond with the book you will die, and you will know it before it happens. Should you steal it with a lie, and claim to be its author, or its subject, your spirit will die, and your words will seem to reach no living ear, shouted from the bottom of a sinking wet hole.

Our ire against thieves must be understood, and it will be in the detail of a curse wrought.

Purloiner of these pages, may you be skewered and fried and fed to those so desperate they do not identify their meat, and whom strip their meat of names and titles should it have them.

May you garden in shards of glass, with only lead onions to harvest, and be only rewarded with them when you can uproot with nothing but your bloody wrist nubs and set them down away from the glass.

May your sword run black with ink and turn into a brush when you most need a sword; your enemy will strike you apart while you write your pleas for mercy, each becoming a laughable relic when stained with your blood.

May your bedfellow secret serpents into your sleeping presence, free to envenom your body and dreams alike.

May you find calamity upon the road, and have all your bones and organs trampled by the horse and cattle that pass until you are of the dirt: a smear too indistinct to draw remark.

May a fissure develop in your nethers, and from it you will birth discharges of diseases you never had to catch, but are caught from you instead. May your bedfellow witness and reject you in horror. Only the diseases will call you parent, and celebrate you when they claim the title of plague.

May a smart tiger injure you and leave you in a clearing, your miserable squeals to serve as bait for better prey. Slowly you will die, and many times it will use you, keeping your wound open with a claw. You will have to eat your own kind, left from its meals, just to continue on as this wretch.

May you boil in the sun, not under it.

May two arrows, fired across the world, change direction as the compass needle does and each find one of your eyes.

May your bones be rearranged to arthritic catacombs.

May a rhinoceros find your bung fascinating. It will obsess him as the alchemist obsesses over a blotch of gold in a brick of lead.

May you become fixated upon this tale until your mind reads it when it is not there, when you have long discarded it to hide the evidence of your crimes. Its pages will stick to your back and not peel, its characters will join you when you bathe, in the forms they took after the page of death, and look into your eyes while you wash, blaming you for their fate. Its burned words will forever be in your palms, and when you flex them the page will turn and they will burn closer to the end.

This is your curse for trying to own this book with your hands, or for trying to master it with your own words. It does not belong with you, to you. Let it pass through you without greed. You can hold the hide, but nothing else. You are supposed to be empty enough to desire the contents, you fool.

And so, cursed or no, continue.

Hole

Do not die underground. That is what they say. Goodly Gods live in the sky, clear of the gnarled grabbing hands of filthy lowly man. They look down and witness death, descending to take righteous spirits to join them in endless gardens of cloud. If you die underground they do not see. If you die underground you fall into your grave. There you remain. Only those lower than the lowly will ever take note.

Four thousand people did not heed this wisdom. Two thousand of them were under the banner of Sovereign Reyvathird, and had marched into the mouth of Wormskoll Cave with no intention of dying. What they intended was the taking of the cave itself, and of the frosty iron gates deep within. Through those bars man and demon and Subtlerrannean god could barter and bargain. Poisons and potions could change hands, but no bodies, and no possessing spirits. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth now Available on Kindle

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

Hey folks, just a quick post to let you know that my longest novel ever, Invoke the Bloody Mouth, is now available on Kindle for $2.99 or free on Kindle Unlimited.  (Psst, it’s also free in its entirety here on the blog).  Please give it a look if you’re interested; the blurb is below.

It is the age of the beity.  The animals of the world have grown in size and intellect, and in their wake humanity is reduced to meek servitude.  They say the humans did it to themselves, shying away from the chaos they created.  Loric Shelvtale says that, and much more in the course of his duties as a storyteller in the court of the great bear: Krakodosus the thundercoat, Scion of the Salmon Run.

Until one evening, during a key performance, he violates one of the ultimate rules, meant to keep his kind in check.  Fleeing for his life, he seeks the only human power left, a secret reserved only for dentists, who are still allowed to forge metal to keep the giant teeth of their masters clean.  That secret is the Bloody Mouth, an oath that turns a dentist into protector and warrior, and the tool of their trade into a weapon.

And so begins their struggle, to flee the beities, and perhaps learn how the world could have reached such a state, though they would be shocked to find it all started long ago, on a place called the internet, where their forebears could not stop obsessively staring at photos of adorable animals…

Lizard-Haunted Walls (an erasure poem)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

What follows is an erasure poem of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, which, if you’re not familiar, means I have erased most of the text but left the remaining words in order to form a new work.  I attempted to have a narrative, structure, and some rhyme, so the resulting story is quite abstract, but I promise there’s one there!

Lizard-Haunted Walls

(an erasure poem of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows)

by

Blaine Arcade

His Little Home First

Brooms and chairs had eyes of white
penetrating lowly house.
Spirit divine struck cellarage private,
busy working dust sounds. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Clutch of the Sig-neagle Shreds an Old Wrong

Shortly after the Battle of Lore Extraction came to a disappointing close, peace settled into the surrounding lands. To many it seemed the situation could grow no more extreme than the Trojan Horse laying siege to the fear-full lion’s city, fangs and claws crossed with metal weapons utterly forbidden elsewhere.

No matter which way it went, there would be no repercussions afterward, for there was one corner of the Wild Trinity on each side of the conflict, once again demonstrating its structural stability. There had been times where Vissovis the Golden Fleece had been involved in minor conflicts along with his siblings, and those had not stressed the grand relationships either. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part nine)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 2 hours)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Details are Hammered out with Veteran Hammers and Baboon Nails

She does not arrive without her procession. She does not arrive without her elite foot soldiers. She does not arrive without their support beities. She does not arrive without her support beities’ human slaves.

This brings with her a great many creatures, big and small, and necessitates quite the space for them to make and break camp. When considering Staircase, the front of Staircase since it could not be approached from any other angle, the nearest such space was a bowl in the Earth, into which the flesh-dense vines had grown and blanketed. Now they would serve as natural bedding for the forces of the arriving Assaulquus, the Trojan Horse, the Wild Trinitarian of war. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part eight)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 3 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Rainbow Climbs Color by Color

Finally the marmoset Ellapock came of use to the travelers, after it became apparent that Hygenis’s general knowledge of the layout of the land would not be sufficient to find Staircase. Both humans had pictured a towering city, with Loric imagining all the more aggressively thanks to images from the bottomless book of places with names like Dubai, New York, and Tokyo.

Instead they were met with forests taller than anticipated, and uneven rocky paths that often dropped into pits, which did little to stop the trees from taking root but much to stop their feet from finding comfortable traction. Hygenis’s mental map had kept everything flattened in two dimensions, and she grimly revised their time of arrival by several days once they encountered the hazards, meaning the Babeloons, or the Sig-neagle, or even the Scion, whose fate remained unknown, might catch up with them. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part seven)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 45 minutes)

2036 is the Kept Year

And the Ducks Expand Immeasurably in Dignity

Yes, they walked into the sky. To parcel their daily trip out more than that, they walked from their frolicking fountain across a red carpet, with many onlookers, and into an elevator that then closed its doors and escorted them gently to their penthouse in the sky where they would disembark and wait to do the whole thing again the following day.

This was the march of the Peabody ducks, as they had marched since the year 1933. It consisted of one male, a drake as they are called, and his five accompanying hens of drabber color. While the feathers upon his crown were a bright, nearly iridescent, green, like the felt on a billiards table spruced up for its first date, he was sometimes not the center of attention. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part six)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 19 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Best Strategy is Blind

Compassleaf was in tumult when its latest visitor arrived on the wing. He’d seen such chaos in a supposedly civilized place before, but only when the lord of the town had decided to disband it in light of his own approaching death. The end result had been a raid of all its shelters by wild beities: a cascade of blood and competing theft that shredded what it stole more often than it didn’t.

Things in the Scion’s city weren’t as bad as all that, but the air was squirming with short tempers and frustration. So many birds came and went with urgent perpendicular paths that they were colliding midair and fighting. Local songbirds suddenly possessed of fierce pride and determination, despite their cargo rarely being anything more consequential than love ballads between blossoming romances, fought claw to claw with much heartier crows. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part five)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 31 minutes)

…

“I didn’t understand much of that, but I take it that man had some insight into the Forbidden Thumbs,” Hygenis said once Loric had finished telling one of the bottomless book’s countless tales. The trio was still ambling away from Compassleaf, led by the mongrel who decided to tolerate them anew every time he heard them speak, looked back, and realized they were not imaginary.

“What’s the internet?” he asked to check if he was real enough to speak as well.

“A network of information powered by electricity,” Loric explained. Being the first time he’d said such a thing out loud, he realized how much his dark learning under the pillows had silently shifted his foundation. What had crumbled on stage under the baboon’s gaze was just the standing husk, like the world of old in its dying days. “It could move any information across the world in seconds, including moving images.” Continue reading →