fantasy

Heirs of Cain: Venus in League

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Severin Molochi is in love with a goddess.  She’s not the kind found in a church, or that you can take with you to church for that matter.  She’s of the old, muddy, animal line of Cain: those who gained power in the world’s first murder.  Just as Severin and his goddess Wanda are settling in their new home, setting up her future dominion, her jealous siblings come calling, but they’re not after her.  They want every gods’ most valuable asset, the mortal chosen as the conduit between them and the people, who in this case happens to share her bed.

Heirs of Cain, a gothic horror fantasy erotic thriller novelette series, continues here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 16 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in League

Including her name serves no purpose, for she was never going to be a citizen of our village. Such was her stated intent, with so much simulated earnestness that I could not smell the trick, nor could my goddess, lover, and wife Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, until she encountered the applicant up close that is.

Her waiting period was nearly over, which all potential residents of Quarantown had to endure to even step foot over our borders and barriers, both obvious and arcane. The plague called Throng’s Delirium, the impetus for the founding of Quarantown in the first place, before it was commandeered, still in secret, by my Wanda, and before I was wooed as her chief disciple and chiefest confidante, still ravaged the continent. Continue reading →

Snakewaist: Hurricane They (finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 35 minutes)

Winds of Change

Much of their mission passed as a blur once Clove was brought into the fold, as she immediately turned it around, bringing all of them, especially the Spare Changelings, under her wing.

Shortly after the rescue they all reconvened inside Clove’s apartment high in the tree. It was like a fruit, dangling from a high branch and paneled in glass all the way around, its three floors suspended by black wires. It only took meeting her to understand how she secured what had to be one of the best views in the entire tree. Continue reading →

Snakewaist: Hurricane They (part one)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Finally, justice for the elemental spirits powering hurricanes.  The humans have decided to use gender neutral pronouns when referring to them, as should have always been the case.  What’s this!?  protest?  They shall know the wrath of the newest and strongest storms in a climate they stoked themselves!  All the elementals need is a harbinger to guide them…

Chaxium and Ladyspiller Onthinice aren’t your typical fairies.  The couple has now spent years on the road, adventuring and battling threats in a changing world with the help of their transforming lizard-shaped vehicle Snakewaist.  Something is amiss with the weather down south, so they head off to investigate, but their best bet for help is Chaxium’s old flame Clove.  Hurricane They is the first novella in a new trilogy for the Snakewaist saga, so feel free to get caught up.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 20 minutes)

(estimated reading time for entire novella: 2 hours, 55 minutes)

Snakewaist

Hurricane They

by

Blaine Arcade

Squall Tormenta

Occurring in the Bermuda Triangle does not place it there, responsible as it is for many of the famous disappearances at that latitude, and even more longitudinally. Occurring in the Gulf of Mexico does not place it there either. Squall Tormenta exists within an ocean current, so it is placed everywhere that current may touch and can occur without being accused of having moved at the last minute even when that is what happens, to prevent certain undesirable elementals from showing their youthful faces.

Somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico the waters split in a most unbiblical fashion. Like divorcing tectonic plates they opened and drained into themselves, creating a marine canyon of raging waterfall walls and churning floor. From out of the depths came shadows, shadows that pierced walls and floor to reveal both rusted hulks and boulders uprooted. Continue reading →

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 →

Watery and Grave (finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 38 minutes)

December 17th

A Very Unlucky Day

Two minions cleared the elk enough for their master to walk through and stand on the ice near the carriage. Their face and body were also obscured by cloak and hood, free of creeping growth but just as tattered as those of their servants. Tavros could see that the person was small, only about half the height of their creations.

“Tavros Celliday?” A woman by her pitch. December pressed her ear against the wooden wall, barely able to hear what was said while her siblings hovered over the giant snowflake they’d found. Their absolute silence was far more important than asking them why it distracted them so. Continue reading →

Watery and Grave (part one)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

Enchanted to life as little more than festival entertainment, a quartet of ice sculptures find themselves abandoned, quickly becoming acquainted with danger as they flee from steaming food carts, fire-spewing domestic dragons, and the looming threat of a rising sun and a short winter.

As luck would have it, or rather as he forced luck to have it, Tavros Celliday, notary sorcerer and luck tracker, arrives to help them journey to the perpetually frozen north.  When he looks away from their luck, just for a moment, evil swoops in and snatches them away.

Oh and just wait until you find out who the narrator is!  (Yes, it’s me… but who am I!?)

(Estimated reading time: 1 hour, 22 minutes)

(estimated reading time for whole novella: 3 hours)

Watery and Grave

by

Blaine arcade

November 17th

An Overall Unlucky Day

The prevailing sentiment might be that luck doesn’t apply to infants, and that if it does the luck doesn’t take effect until the child is old enough to understand their lot in life. So even if either idea is true, it doesn’t apply here, as the four born that day were born at their full intellectual capacity.

I don’t know about unlucky, but the place they were born was certainly unusual: the fair grounds in the midst of that continent’s biggest annual celebration. It was called the Tiring Week, and it coincided with most large animals settling into their caves and dens for hibernation. On the human side of things they wore themselves out with revelry and craftsmanship, but the best naps they could muster afterward only lasted a day or two.

On day three of the Tiring Week there were many scheduled events including a sledding competition, a magical firework show, and the activity that resulted in the spawning of the four youths that we would call unfortunate if that luck debate was actually settled. Continue reading →

Heirs of Cain: Venus in Labor

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Severin Molochi is in love with a goddess.  She’s not the kind found in a church, or that you can take with you to church for that matter.  She’s of the old, muddy, animal line of Cain: those who gained power in the world’s first murder.  Just as Severin and his goddess Wanda are settling in their new home, setting up her future dominion, her jealous siblings come calling, but they’re not after her.  They want every gods’ most valuable asset, the mortal chosen as the conduit between them and the people, who in this case happens to share her bed.

Heirs of Cain, a gothic horror fantasy erotic thriller novelette series, continues here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 30 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Labor

Accepting their compliments proved difficult, and I had no way of explaining myself either. You see, I, Severin Pelts, still had not informed anyone in Quarantown that my wife, Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, was secretly a bloodthirsty goddess from a smudged and misinterpreted age long before any notions of a Christ child or contemplative Buddha.

One day they would all know, the shock bending them into kneeling prayer, where they would no doubt stay for the remainder of their lives. They’d be fools not to. Already they knew the magnetic draw of her company, knowing it just then at the dinner party I’d arranged, the guest list made up of several early pilgrims to Quarantown who seemed like good candidates for lesser disciples than myself when the time came: Miss Giselle Ulterrine the duck farmer, Giggles Terroir our town sommelier, Doppler Burstyn the mining magnate, and the freshest of them, Godwin Hammerstein, a playwright looking to be heard of. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Stories Redux #2: Cheater Wings

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

These stories were written live on stream based on prompts provided by the viewers. They have been edited, with this second more in-depth edit occurring much later, but not meaningfully rewritten or expanded so as to preserve the spirit of the exercise. Sadly, the prompts themselves were not recorded until many stories in.  Sometimes the prompts were silly challenges, or quirky thoughts, or dark ideas, or utter nonsense.  I did my best each time.

If you enjoy this, please check out the other activities from the stream. If you would like something longer and much more thoroughly planned, simply investigate my more traditional work at the top of the page.

Cheater Wings

prompt provided by Simlover48

The altar to the Earth god Gohees was buried deep in the ashen forest, surrounded by trees that had looked an inch from death for six thousand years. Fineesh’s path to it would normally have been fraught with danger, but she was there in her capacity as the Earth-friend.

And not just the Earth-friend, but the peacekeeper for all the other gods as well. She was water-friend, fire-friend, air-friend, and Earth-friend. She could show no favoritism, only respect. Gone was the age where the arguments of the gods sundered continents. Now they used one human from every generation as their friend. Fineesh, a girl of fourteen, was but the latest.

Continue reading →

Heirs of Cain: Venus in Quarantine

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Severin Molochi is in love with a goddess.  She’s not the kind found in a church, or that you can take with you to church for that matter.  She’s of the old, muddy, animal line of Cain: those who gained power in the world’s first murder.  Just as Severin and his goddess Wanda are settling in their new home, setting up her future dominion, her jealous siblings come calling, but they’re not after her.  They want every gods’ most valuable asset, the mortal chosen as the conduit between them and the people, who in this case happens to share her bed.

Heirs of Cain, a gothic horror fantasy erotic thriller novelette series, continues here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 27 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Quarantine

After the thirtieth entry or so I realized what was so familiar about the process; it was as if these unsuspecting people were being added to a menu, complete with their prices, and the intention was to serve them all to a solitary but reliable customer who would appear out of the dark and damp at the same time each day without the ring of a doorbell, like a fox fed once and then forever entitled.

And her name was Wanda Blasphemer Pelts. My Wanda. My whole world, to have her tell it and me experience it. She did not permit me what used to be the most basic knowledge of position spatial and chronological, which still prevented a precise understanding of both my location and the year, but I knew that she and I had recorded three months of paradigm-gnawing history together, written in an ink of sweat and a sensual but possession-gnarled hand, our bodies intertwined like two pages stuck together, the words of experience on her, still wet, transferred messily to my blank by rapturous spineless contact. Continue reading →

Heirs of Cain: Venus in Transit

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 11 Comments

Severin Molochi is aboard a train… but to where?  And come to think of it, what year is it?  He has lost his place and time in the world.  Could it be the work of the bewitching predatory woman who enters his private car, wrapped in furs, with designs and desire in her eyes?  Heirs of Cain, a gothic horror fantasy erotic thriller novelette series, begins here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour and 33 minutes)

(estimated reading time for entire series: 8 hours, 38 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Transit

by

Blaine Arcade

The number one… followed some time later and after strenuous mental investigation by the number eight. What was the one? One of the seven? One of the six? One of the two? All of these number were suddenly in my head, throbbing as if of great importance, but they were a distraction.

What had I been searching for? It was difficult to recall as I had my forehead pressed against the cold glass of a locomotive window, eyes chilled as if dangling just outside by threads. What I saw was snow-cloaked firs by the thousands, with a stormy winter tailor still in the process of garbing them. Continue reading →