(reading time: 1 hour, 28 minutes)
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
(reading time: 1 hour, 9 minutes)
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
(reading time: 1 hour, 18 minutes)
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
(reading time: 1 hour, 30 minutes)
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
(reading time: 54 minutes)
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
(reading time: 1 hour, 38 minutes)
Enough Stock for Soup
Veer Keystonr could not see much of anything from his place at the bottom of the lifeboat. He could only trade information with the other bodiless members of the Calcitheater Rob had rescued. (Blaine’s Note: Veer is a skull we mentioned earlier, recognizable by the iron crown bonded to his head. He tutored Alast in arithmetic when he first joined the crew. In fleshed life he was a human ledger, and his memory for numbers seems to have only improved since then.) Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 23 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 12 hours, 52 minutes)
By
Blaine Arcade (in a sense)
The Second of Four Bathroom Breaks
As a child not quite out of diapers yet, did you ever have the fear that the toilet would suck you down into it and you would drown or be crushed, or both, in its pipes? I didn’t, but I’ve heard people say things like that. It’s always a joke; they’re always reflecting on how dumb they were, how frightening new things are, and how a toilet might carry with it all the fears associated with water in general. If you showed one to a small animal it would just think of it as another place it could potentially drink or drown.
I didn’t have those fears, but I struggle with them now as an adult. I have a legitimate reason, though not one you are likely to believe. As the heading of this section says, I’ll be talking about the second of four things. The proper place to start is the first, so if you haven’t read my first, I suppose you could call it an account, I encourage you to do so. It will be much easier to follow along that way. The first one is called Captain Rob Fights, and it can probably be found near wherever you found this one. Continue reading
