fiction

Twenty-four Days of Ringworm and Religion: Day One

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 25 Comments

Welcome to what is likely your first advent calendar fantasy novel!  Each day is a chapter, and should be read as such, but who am I to stop you from catching up?  What follows is the story of one Marzipan Ridner, a young trans girl aching for the fulfillment of the holiday season.  When a mysterious wooden Advent calendar shows up she opens the first door, and finds herself whisked away to a world-tree of contrasting deities and binding bureaucracy.  She has less than a month to find someone willing to be her spiritual patron, but the denizens of the tree don’t seem very hospitable…

(reading time: 19 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 5 hours, 8 minutes)

Twenty-four Days of Ringworm and Religion

by

Blaine Arcade

On the First Day

The little box she held in the pocket of her torn jacket once contained a three dollar ring with a glass stone. To Marzipan Ridner that was jewelry, finery. It meant the box it came in was fancy, suitable as a coffin for her latest sacrifice to the pagan gods of the creek in her backyard. It was less of a backyard and more unusable land adjacent to the unlivable land her house was parked on, but its thin leafless trees and howling winds would serve the purposes of the ritual well enough. Continue reading →

Big-Saw-in-Law

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

Glassy eyes, gaping mouths, matted fur…  Sports mascots are supposed to be fun, but if you see them in the wrong light you can feel a jolt of fear.  What if they weren’t just a joke?  What if they were as alive as anything else, with their own instincts and hungers?

(reading time: 1 hour, 7 minutes)

Big-Saw-In-Law

by

Blaine Arcade

The Kleinbury High Spinners were up three games that season so far, so morale had improved in the neighborhood. Perhaps enough that he could return uneventfully, which was what Kevin Woods tried that Saturday afternoon. He was never the biggest football fan, more of a baseball guy as he always told people, but his son Matt was on the team. Continue reading →

Ad Space

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(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

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

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 (Part Three)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(Back to Part One)

(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)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(Back to Part One)

(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 →

The Moneyed and the Mystic (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 5 Comments

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 →

The Field Guide to Fantasy Birding (for enthusiasts only)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

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) download

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 →

Rather Spartan

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

In this thriller/horror short story the Snake War Museum is just one of many, an opportunity for Claire to confront history.  It’s just her, the collection, and the audio guide… at least until she hears her own name in the headphones…

(reading time: 34 minutes)

Rather Spartan

by

Blaine Arcade

If a museum does its job well, its physical location in the world is inconsequential. The best place for the George Washington museum might be his birthplace, Westmoreland County, Virginia, but the best museum would be the one that had his actual shoes, his actual buttons, his actual tools, his actual quills and inks, wherever they were, even if the collection was accidentally shipped to, say, Ulverstone, Tasmania. Continue reading →