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Twitch Stream Story: The Warmest Egg

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

The oviraptor was an egg thief, one of the best of the Mesozoic, but one of their number failed so spectacularly that history did more than record it. It became a story told across super-continents, across ages, and even between the planets of the Milky Way. The oviraptor, were she intelligent enough to speak, would not call her heist a failure.

The egg was special; she knew that the moment she snatched it. It had a shell of two components: half metal and half glass. The glass was full of a reddish-amber liquid, like the blood of ancient trees happily spilled. Within the liquid grew an embryo, unlike one that came out of Mesozoic eggs. The first thing they learned was that it couldn’t be eaten, at all. The strongest beaks and claws had no effect on its material. They dropped rocks on it. Not a scratch. Defeated and hungry, the oviraptors didn’t know what else to do with it. They threw it in with their own eggs and waited, occasionally mesmerized by its pulsing warmth. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Bark Wars

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

The prison had busted open more than one hundred years ago. Now vines crawled in through its windows and weaved between the bars of its small plastic cells. The cells for fish were long shattered, the glittering rainbow pebbles they had swam over were now spread across every aisle. The warden, the manager as the olds would have called her, was long gone. Her species and all its breeds were long gone.

The building was full of bad memories for most of the animals, at least the ones whose ancestors had been held there, in the gulag of the Pet me! Pet me! Pet store, but memories had no effect on the runty pug as it scurried through the colorful pebbles and kept its stubby snout glued to the floor. The dog ran into the darkness of the back, ducking under mops filled with cobwebs and mouse fur. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: We Wield this Hammer, and We Ban!

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

“We cannot do this thing! The gods beyond will strike us down for it! I, Administrator Rotahn, of the Messager peoples, of the arid message boards, vote no. It cannot be forged!” The men and women flanking the administrator roared their agreement. The Messagers were an excitable people, born as they were from the exclamations of startled and confused gods.

Less than a generation ago, a generation by god standards anyway, they had landed in the darkness between computers like meteors and sprung forth with venom and sword drawn. It was a miracle they’d been convinced to send a representative to the gathering that day. All races of the early digital space needed to be there for the forging to work. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: The Girl in the Bottle

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

His collection for the day included a purple cowrie the size of his pinky nail, the green tip of a crab’s leg (hopefully, wherever it was, it still lived), a forked shark tooth, and a yellow seaweed float that looked exactly like a lemon. Pembo was disappointed. What good was living in the village next to the world’s most bountiful beach if it couldn’t provide him with amazing specimens every single day of the summer?

It was the beach of Illustraya, the beach of the goddess with the fanciest clothes and the loudest giggles. Its color were spectacular, the stuff of legends. Sometimes even the sand wouldn’t settle for being white; huge streaks would dye themselves green, or red, or silver. Weeds from the other side of the world would wash up, murals painted on their Pembo-sized leaves by the striped merfolk. Continue reading →

Twitch Stream Story: Last Spot in the Bouquet

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

The cruise liner Seraphina had sunk more than a year ago. Its bow stuck out of the slimy sand at the bottom of the ocean like the jagged edge of a can forcibly pried open. Her contents had spilled out like blood, settling into a swath of sand and rock next to her. The bacteria had come. The worms had come. Now the eels were enjoying their day in the artificial reef.

They came by the hundreds to hide and sleep in its shadows, but Seraphina provided them with so much more. The eels hadn’t realized what living in the near black depths had done to their minds. They never had things to focus on, or to cherish, as it all simply floated until it was buried. Now, here was something slow in its burying and colorful and lively in its construction. The eel minds had something to focus on, new things to see beyond their simple lives of swimming. Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 4 Comments

(reading time: 41 minutes)

The Legend of Broadside Barnaby

Old Thresher the card shark.  Remember him?  I bested his challenge more than a hundred times over and it were way past due for him to give up the location of Broadside Barnaby.  He were the last name left.  With him collected the Manifest would be complete, everyone accounted for in myth, and I could have my pa back.  My family could have the eventual peace that I worked so hard to disrupt. Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Part Three)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(reading time: 1 hour, 2 minutes)

That were the story I told my pocket twister.  It weren’t the most heartening, but I think confiding in him gave him some strength.  He shook off most of that water and started looking more like his old self and less like a cloud constipated with rain.

Now you know whose soul I were collecting all them names for.  I knew Pa weren’t at peace.  He were still kept from Heaven and Hell in the ropes of Knot-eye, and the only way to get him back or get him to my mother were to obey the will of the Laudgod and eventually be rewarded.  I had to be the man he told me to be, to conquer and dominate the West so thoroughly that nothing could stop me.  Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Part Two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

(reading time: 50 minutes)

The Tangent of Sara’s Sewing Spiders

I told you about my mother’s dress shop.  I didn’t tell you it were driven out of business by the peculiarest of competitors.  My mother, bless her glorious soul in Heaven, were even kind enough to bring the woman who owned the venture a pie as a welcoming gift.  Sure it were blackberry pie, not her finest pie by miles, but you can’t expect saintly behavior from a shrewd businesswoman such as her. Continue reading →

Manifest of the West (Part One)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

(blurb)

There’s a version of the wild west where the land in the westward direction just never stopped stretching, where magic seeped out of the canyons and rode the whirlwinds.  That’s where Lionel Worthett lives, and it’s where he would’ve died if the almighty Laudgod had just let him.

Instead he was given a task and a document called the Manifest of the West.  All he has to do is get the most powerful miscreants, villains, and varmints to sign their names so they can be turned into legends that won’t get any more astonishing, and then he can have his reward, one soul returned from the hereafter, back to the infinite west.

(reading time: 52 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 25 minutes)

Manifest of the West

by

Blaine Arcade

The Hellmouth

There I were, standing before the open mouth of the grand devil’s kingdom… one of its mouths anyway.  A hot breath full of ashes descended on me.  It were the first one I’d ever set my own eyes on and it weren’t what I expected.  The mouth part of the name were supposed to be figurative.  It were a disgusting word representing a gate so people would think even less of it than they already did.  Except it weren’t so figurative. Continue reading →

Captain Rob Fights (Finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

(reading time: 1 hour, 2 minutes)

A Beast Fights

brosword

The tables for the feast had buckets crafted into them because bergfolk celebrations often devolved into dancing right where you ate; this way they could not be kicked aside. The buckets were filled to the brim with all sorts of strange refreshments: spiced green cleansing water, warm red oystie sauce, pure blue toil water, and a foaming drink called scrub-throat that kept its bubbles for days. The bergfolk swished them about in their mouths and noses, sometimes holding one nostril closed so they could blast a fountain of it out the other. Alast watched as a woman gladly opened her mouth to accept a jet of cleansing water fired from a neighboring nostril. It might’ve been rude not to join, but Alast couldn’t bring himself to do it; he let any liquid that came his way splash across his shirt instead. Continue reading →