Balanced Aych
The Aych Fauce and Sea Fauce would’ve been considered deities themselves if Porce didn’t already have such stiff competition amongst its religions. For all recorded time they had poured, their flow never weakening. Third Sink would’ve long overflowed if the Snyre drain wasn’t open. Continue reading
Cloistered Cloader
Seven days passed from Rob’s bargain with Fixadilaran Bocculum. He continued his lessons with Ciamuse, but each time his mind drifted further from her lectures. He saw himself crossing the city, the river, and the bone powder dunes to arrive at the doorstep of Cloader of theft. Continue reading
Tales of the Living Sixteen: Ciamuse
The first thing she had to get used to was privacy stalls. Her tragedy had taken her behind First Stone Door and atop First Toil, to the expanse beyond First Seat and under First Tank. She was in the shadow of Lunginvess and the toil’s lever. The folk in the town there valued their privacy above all else and looked to the stall around them in their architecture. Continue reading
The Swap
Red raw hands, some with spots of black frostbite, rose toward the sky in exultation. The starved men and women of the Greedy Old Mop flooded out of the yellow smelly caverns of the Winchar Straits and into the melt crater Ice Master Shuckr had predicted. Continue reading
Graves of the First
Dinner in Infinicilia occurred at the same time each night, just before Fwa Nippr descended and cloaked herself in a thick black robe to dim the light. The other eight members of the living sixteen arrived right on time to help prepare the meal. Rob was introduced to them all, but they didn’t add much to his evaluations. Argnaught was extraordinary. Vyra was aggressive and unpredictable. Clix fancied himself in charge. Fwa was the florent. Ciamuse was a beloved nutter. Continue reading
The Living Sixteen
The marsh of gore beneath the Fith did not go on forever. The Fith only showed in patches in the Pipes, the rest of the ceiling composed of bedrock or rounded rusted metal. After two drops of walking Vyra leapt up onto a stone plateau with bonepicking. Rob followed. Continue reading
The Pipes
There was a time in Porce where the tiles, toils, and sinks were not the height of civilization. Before the Age of Building, before the Age of Tragedy, things lived within the walls and pipes of Porce, feeding on moisture and lighting their way by thought. Modern tales spoke of the Pipes as the underworld: a pit of damp suffering where evil souls and bodies were stored for all eternity, denied the mercy of complete rot. Those who believed in the eight gods and those of the Toil Papers both believed this. They were only partly right. Continue reading
