(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
(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
Magic is real, as long as you’re in the know. It’s a lot subtler than people think, mostly invisible in fact. It can give you the second last sip from a canteen, let you push a pull door, or make your fortune cookies accurate if as vague as ever.
Dove used it on the stage, her audience only thinking they were looking at illusions. She was happy with that, but now her parents have dragged her to a strange island, the site of a failed music festival, and there’s talk of starting a new country, and a new school, both magical in nature…
Author’s Note: I wrote this novella to be my ‘Harry Potter’, but given my recent disappointment with that author it now works pretty well as a replacement for me. I hope you can get some enjoyment from it as well.
(reading time: 42 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 19 minutes)
The Moneyed and the Mystic
by
Blaine Arcade
Orientation
The sand would’ve been much too hot for bare feet under normal circumstances, but the Théard family didn’t pack any normalcy for the trip. They always left that at home, a house that sat empty most of the time while its supposed occupants were off romancing the stages of the Caribbean and France. Continue reading
In the world of bird watching competition can be intense, sometimes even deadly, sometimes even magical. There are birds you can’t see unless you devote your life to seeing them, and a few are in this short story with an aesthetic best described as ‘birdwatchingpunk’.
(reading time: 43 minutes)
The Field Guide to Fantasy Birding
(for enthusiasts only)
by
Blaine Arcade
NAME: boreal chickadee (Poecile hudsonicus) 
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: a four to six inch bird which may weigh as much as an ounce. Gray wings and a brown streak across the head are the most common features, but the easiest way to identify it is by its white face with gray patches at the sides. It also has short wings and a short dark bill.
DIET: feeds mostly on seeds and insects by probing in bark and across the forest floor. It favors wood beetle larvae most highly.
RANGE: Maine, Vermont, Alaska, Canada, and New York. Migration happens quickly, with hundreds of miles traveled in just a few days.
BEHAVIOR: not picky when it comes to choosing a mate, though they will often mate for life. Boreal chickadees rarely build their own nests, instead choosing to occupy the abandoned efforts of other birds like the woodpecker. Only one egg is laid, its size surprising given the diminutive creatures that produced it.
…
To nearly every person who looked at the amateurishly-produced paper it was just a page out of a field guide, a work in progress at best, something to keep an old lonely man busy. Even his family members would not have recognized it for what it was, because they, even the widower’s children, didn’t recognize him for what he was. Continue reading
Well, they aren’t quite blurbs, given that these stories are, you know, short, but now that we’ve got descriptions for our book series, books, novella/novelette series, novellas, and novelettes available, it’s time to move onto these.
If you don’t know me, I’m Blaine Arcade, a speculative fiction writing hobbyist, and I write lots of out-there science fiction, fantasy, science fantasy, and some horror. All of my stories are available here and free to read, so please check them out if you’re interested. Happy reading!
Jesus has come to town in his big black SUV. He says it’s time for the rapture. The only problem is that this is white Jesus, and he isn’t so friendly.
Hot off adding blurbs to all my book series, standalones, novella/novelette series, novelettes, and short stories here on the blog, I figured I’d do the same thing for all of my novellas as well. I write lots of wild speculative fiction, and it’s all freely available here, so please check out anything that looks interesting to you.
If any of my speculative fiction nonsense sounds interesting you can check out the whole works here and free of charge. This post is all my standalone novels and my gamebook, with book series blurbs, novella blurbs, novelette blurbs, novella/novelette series, and short story descriptions found here.
A pact struck in the distant future, after mankind has colonized dozens of worlds and diversified into engineered subspecies, saw the death of guns and missiles. With the new stigma of ‘farcoward’ weapons comes a return of the sword, shield, and bow.
Dana Rudolph is a grumpy travel writer hopping world to world, keeping to himself until date of publishing, when he is pulled into a vast, and surprisingly icky, conspiracy where he must do his best to protect the ‘appearl’, an anomalous learning gem that formed on its own inside a supercomputer.
Follow him and his sword as he teams up with an amazon and a leprechaun to dismantle the supposedly divine, forcing him to confront his traumatic past. 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
Blaine Arcade 