(reading time: 30 minutes)
Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
(click here for audiobook)
Rethought
Resized
Rewritten
Rerhymed
Retold
by
Blaine Arcade
who has shamelessly molded it from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Argument
In which a harmonious utopia is upset by the harmony's approaching finale, and how one subject journeys with subjects of his own in search of the responsible musicians, only to find themselves beset by monsters, divine jailers, and the collapsing forces of nature.
blaine arcade
The Left Challenging Handful (Finale)
(reading time: 56 minutes)
Burn the Handful
The parliament building, which housed the Shoulders of Government, was made out of an old trunk and kept in the highest residential area of the barn: the hayloft. It was fed with several elevators of varying construction as well as by trained birds and their riders. Many of the birds were reassigned as security that day, and so the lip of the loft was covered with the saddled feathery creatures, their beaks making the line look like a living fence of spikes. Continue reading
The Left Challenging Handful (Part Three)
(reading time: 53 minutes)
Knead the Handful
Forty Myrmidons marched across the walls of Minimil after a hard day’s work. Marching sideways was possible for them, as long as they stayed on all fours, thanks to the clasping hooks on the wrists and ankles of their exoskeletons. Their progress would’ve been extremely slow if not for the divot network.
It was invisible from a distance, which in Minimil was anything greater than two meters. Up close it could be seen as nothing more than even rows of gouge marks in the old wood of the barn walls. Their purpose was to provide footholds to any and all arthropod citizens capable of wall-crawling, the most numerous of which were the Myrmidons. Continue reading
The Left Challenging Handful (Part Two)
(reading time: 37 minutes)
Spread the Handful
The innkeeper thought she rose plenty early to start preparing breakfast for her handful of guests, but when she stepped down from her quarters into the tavern she found it transformed by makeshift houseplants, created by an even earlier bird.
Delicious was roaming about, watering them with single droplets, using a can lifted from the dead garden’s piled tools. She hummed a tune all the while, but by the time she made a complete lap the gnome couldn’t help but sing a verse.
“-I long to see the girl I left behind meee!” When she stopped to breathe she noticed Miss Marood. “Oh, I’m sorry! Did I wake you?” Continue reading
The Left Challenging Handful (Part One)
The small have their own country, and it fits in a barn! The place is called Minimil, and it is home to Lilliputians, Shakespearian fairies, and the angels and devils of the shoulder that help you make all your decisions. Minimil doesn’t yet know it, but it is under attack from an elite team of scoundrels in its gutters, threatened into service by an unknown entity. They will sabotage the tiny government, to keep their heads and achieve their wildest dreams.
This is the second in a trilogy, though each novella tells its own whole story. To get caught up please check out the original: The Challenging Handful.
(reading time: 36 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 2 minutes)
The Left Challenging Handful
by
Blaine Arcade
Pinch the Handful
Typically a man of his stature would have no trouble moving through tight spaces. At only fifteen centimeters tall there were several carved conch shells among the furniture in his palace that were positively roomy, but this welcome, if that’s what it was, was far from that.
He was squeezed front and back by musty wood, the only way to orient himself being the various splinters poking the capitals on the map of his body. The predicament was made all the tighter by the finery he rarely took off: a crown of fused amber glass, shoulder pads of the same, a layered cape of blue and white like ocean waves lapping at the sand, and the decorated saber sheath on his hip. Continue reading
Ad Space
(reading time: 7 minutes)
Ad Space
by
Blaine Arcade
(Legal Disclosure: This work of fiction has been filtered and modified by the United States Ad Plus Council Algorithm, copyright 2036. In compliance with the Corporate Ignorance Prevention Act, all unbranded products and services have been claimed within the text by competitive interests in your area for your convenience.)
A subsidiary of OntheNose Advertising Solutions® was not ready for bad news that day, big or small, but he got it in DigwellTM spades. It started with his Goldenbrowner® toaster, which was supposed to spit out a crispy image of his favorite actress on every HeatzaPizza® slice, but just kept giving him a burned specter, like a lit Ashlesswonder® cigarette positioned just under her face on an old Popcorn Comet Studios® film strip. Continue reading
Brawny Blue Blerkafeld
The beast Blerkafeld is one of the mightiest dragons, and even more conceited. After pilfering magics of time and space he has built his own little pocket world, pulling people from all over the Middle Ages to be his loyal worshipers. The only problem is, one of these groups is secretly a Renaissance fair…
(reading time: 1 hour, 36 minutes)
Brawny Blue Blerkafeld
by
Blaine Arcade
The beast of Kidnapt Valley
Four waterfalls marked the center of the cavern’s many tunnels and chambers. The place was most curious, as the passageways looked naturally formed, the walls porous and uneven, but its layout was certainly the work of intelligence. Each fall was a curtain separating four identical tunnels from each other.
By unknown force, one fall’s flow ceased just as a cluster of four people reached it, letting them view the rising column of the central shaft. They dared not step over the wet line in the dirt; their invitation had warned them not to do so.
Led they were by Peter Iconius, lord of the red heath, equally red of hair and beard. He was a bear of a man, he insisted upon it in fact, wearing a bear tooth necklace whenever his bear tooth crown seemed too formal for the occasion. He’d brought with him the greatest warriors of the village he ruled, masters of sword, bow, and hammer. Continue reading
The Moneyed and the Mystic (Finale)
(reading time: 55 minutes)
Finals
The finals dinner was the first time everyone was in the same place since orientation. Dean Mystpass, who had made exactly zero appearances since then, was there, thoroughly surrounded by staff and newly elected officials so that not a single student could reach him and say what they thought of his first crack at the school. Continue reading
The Moneyed and the Mystic (Part Three)
(reading time: 54 minutes)
Lock-in
Trouble came to all of Cay Royal, not just its students. Word of the intruder and their power spread quickly. Any calls for Dean Mystpass to invent suspension or detention were neutralized when the safety precautions taken essentially counted as punishment. The whole college went on lockdown, students now escorted in groups from tent to tent and back to the dorms by either professors or security guards. Continue reading
The Moneyed and the Mystic (Part Two)
(reading time: 46 minutes)
Partners
Dove looked through her notes while she waited for him. They weren’t physical notes of course. She’d been experimenting with compressing the lectures down to single paragraphs in her mind, trying to get the information as dense as possible to save memory space, which, much like using a computer, simplified her magical efforts. The one she’d created from the introductory Evil Eye Era lesson felt expertly compacted:
Magic is the psychic power of secrecy, threatened by transparency. In its early days even the people using it did not understand its nature. The first system was the evil eye, by which spells were cast with intense unblinking stares at their targets coupled with focused thought and emotion. It flourished for hundreds of years until its collapse in 1899, when a combination of exploding population, scientific advancement, and superstition regarding the evil eye specifically made it too common of knowledge. After it ceased working it took more than two decades, and a notable worldwide war, before a new method took root. Thus we have the snap system, powered by concise incantation words and kinetic catalyst sounds. Continue reading
