magic

Snakewaist: Species Invader (part two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

Logistics

With the mathematical minds of the gigagoyles on their side, they were spared the most difficult calculations of roster and rendezvous. That isn’t to say things went smoothly and without argument, there was in fact no greater concentration of interpersonal discord in the history of life on Earth than occurred between those tens of gigagoyles in the days immediately preceding departure, it just happened in channels of infinitely high bandwidth and thus took only microseconds for each barb to be thrown and countered.

In the strictest terms, acquiring their army should have been child’s play. Gigagoyles had unfettered access to most ferrier software, as they were always intended to be compatible. Plenty of couchgrousers were without pilots who might disconnect their machines from networks when not in use. Any of Onthinice’s recruits could zap to a machine they detected, insert themselves as a pilot program, and be just as effective as a flesh and glitter-blood pilot. Continue reading →

Snakewaist: Species Invader (part one)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Chaxium and her formerly human partner Ladyspiller are modern fairies, fighting the good fight against human encroachment, and this time fighting the fairy who goes too far, Chaxium’s ex Clove!  In fey warfare there is only one reliable tool, the living magical machines they can pilot, called ferriers.  Clove’s latest scheme seeks to harness a new breed of them, turn their noble nature to instinctive violence aimed squarely at mankind in this, the fifth Snakewaist novella.  You can find the beginning of the series here.

Snakewaist

Species Invader

by

Blaine Arcade

Underground Networking

Teaching the rules of a board game to a new player is always a taxing process, rewriting their entire world view on a smaller scale, and it becomes infinitely more difficult when new people keep wandering in, staring curiously until they ask to participate, and the unfinished teach must start all over again… and again… and again!?

“So everybody gets two pieces on the board and an understudy in their wings. What, you too? No, sure. We can modify it to accommodate- one, two, three, seven… seventeen players. So, you get two pieces on the board-” Blizzardime the diminutive, the genderless, struggled to explain.

“Is that a-“

“Incredibly fun board game?” they finished. “Yes it is.” Continue reading →

Pineberry Lights

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Rumraisin Knacklevern and his best friend Mollywald, a talking flower in a wheeled RC pot, are finally being taken to the farmer’s market where magic and produce are sold in tandem.  There they just might find what they’ve been looking for, Molly’s hypothetical boyfriend, seeing as she’s never encountered one of her own kind before.

Along the way they might cross paths with the strange denizens of the market, like amorous pet rocks, an undead hunger artist, and gourds that are better at eating people than people are gourds in this, a cozy, alternate-1990s, autumnal fantasy novella.

(estimated reading time: 2 hours, 35 minutes)


Pineberry Lights

by

Blaine Arcade

The Kind-of Long Drive

“I spy with my magical eye… something that starts with the letter P.”

“Petals!”

“No.”

“Dang. I thought you were trying to get me because I can’t see mine.”

“The only thing I’m trying to get you is a boyfriend.”

“Parking spots,” interjected the witch from the driver’s seat, having already learned the lesson of not looking over her shoulder when the last time caused both her concentration and one of the windshield wipers to slip. Maybe they’d spot it standing up on the way back, waiting for them like a hitchhiker. At least it was the passenger side one. Continue reading →

Grab (finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 55 minutes)

In the fog, in the fervor, in the distress, and in the uncertainty, it became impossible for them to tell how much time was passing. A grabbler can known an hour by the number of breaths, but not these grabblers. A grabbler can know autumn by the lethargy in a beetle’s wings, but not these grabblers. These grabblers were sinking in Rooth Tugt.

Falling, Jeremiad realized dumbly as she took a false step and tumbled. The fog tried to trip her with arcing roots and smooth flat rocks underneath, but she managed to put a foot down. It struck a larger rocks, which slid, so her other foot did the same, creating two little sleds that she could use to reach the bottom of the incline as long as she jumped over a few more roots and caught the slipping stone shoes on the other side. Continue reading →

Grab (part seven)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 17 minutes)

As they lapsed back into silence, thoughts of the Half-Biters and Beerbetters were left behind. The eye of Xeams did not leave their sky, but soon its powers would be neutralized under the humid greenery. If half the stories of the place were to be believed, only grabblers had a good chance of surviving a journey to the jungle’s center, facing just as much risk on the way out. Even if Roddery Graychild were to pursue them into the dense tangle it was unlikely he could get many others to do so, especially after being half-drowned or whole-drowned by the enigmatic hand of Hexaclete.

Instead the grabblers’ sights were set on the jutting ruin ahead, offering the furthest and least-impeded ingress into Rooth Tugt that, according to Beocroak, also aligned with their heading. To investigate it they would first have to scale the intimidating rock ridge upon which it grew like broken teeth, difficult, but not so much as the crumbling wall of the basin. Or so they thought during that last stretch of Welkmadat, all the way to the start of the climb. Continue reading →

Grab (part four)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 8 minutes)

Far far below, yet still so far from the endless country of sad circling nothings that was the halo of Tauntalagmite’s torpor sleep, gray fire blazed. Dead flames would not spread without encouragement, and there it took the form of a strange little parade of four ghosts and one wheelbarrow.

A wailing Hodmim Holz was lashed to a post stuck in it at an angle, like he was a ship’s figurehead. From him smoke billowed out of his mouth, out of the flapping fissures stretched over his collarbone. Pale flame flicked and licked his skin the way lizards taste the air. Pushing him along, forcing the wheelbarrow over every loose rock instead of turning slightly, was Crosscup, so close to his own backsliding goal. Continue reading →

Grab (part three)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 24 minutes)

It would have been the perfect time for the exterminator to arrive with his dog Plucker. The door was thrown open with a bang. In strode, with brilliant confidence, Crosscup the cleric. He’d invaded countless perfect times, never his own, and he mucked this one up worse than most. For he was recognized by Reyvathird, from the first moments of his gray reticence, and the man did not take kindly to his presence.

The sovereign stood, dropping his arms, and Bedlamoyne was curious about the invader too, making no show of their separation, nor slamming her hand on the table in victory. In their deadlock they’d both forgotten about the contest the rest of the mead hall had been cheering on. With its sudden deflation, almost heard like wet flatulence, the mass of gray groaned and protested. Continue reading →

Grab (part two)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 28 minutes)

Meanwhile Beocroak was streets and alleys away, which was a problem. What he wanted was disorganized rock, not a bricklayer’s pattern or a mason’s mosaic anywhere to be seen. Gray ways hid the actual ground if he moved too swiftly. Twice he’d nearly planted a foot in nothing and fallen into a crevasse that, if it had a bottom, would’ve finished in Tauntalagmite’s gullet, as the queen of infested skulls, who bedded oldest thing on oldest rock, was also the swallower of darkness. Souls lost in lightless fall were the medicine she took in the morn she never saw.

After finding a gray spiral staircase that might have ringed a gargantuan stalactite he was made to follow it, every other path obscured behind spreading gray walls that only cracked to grow plaques and mortar. Up was his goal, not down. Forced to battle confusion he was, as his descent was coupled with the visible rise of Toeteld in the foggy distance. Continue reading →

Grab (part one)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 9 Comments

Hunt with your bare hands!  This is the world of grabbling, where the mightiest warriors in the land equip themselves with wildlife by ramming their arms down various throats and making them into weapons.  Delve deep underground in this low fantasy epic where the grabbler Beocroak, sole survivor of a petty bloodbath, must battle his way out of a rising ghostly city capitalizing on all that foolish subterranean death.  Should he make it out of that cavernous grave, there is still the harsh world beyond, of Goodly and ghastly gods, of giant floating eyes watching your every move, and of sinister curses illuminated by green witchfire.

Grab

by

Blaine Arcade

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 22 minutes) (time for entire novel: 10 hours, 44 minutes)

Curse

Bound in hide, scorch-writ on wood, death diverse and plenty harvested this tome from the minds and lore of men. Safe and content it sits upon the owner’s shelf, in the author’s legacy. You are a guest in its pages. Do not smudge with your fingers. Do not mar with your drool. This is a meal for the soul, so do not eat or drink near it to avoid damage.

If you are unwelcome, if your eyes be thieves of words, know that you are cursed when these contents leave the shelf, lose their blanket of dust, and are not properly and primly returned. This curse has fingers that can touch in different ways. Should you abscond with the book you will die, and you will know it before it happens. Should you steal it with a lie, and claim to be its author, or its subject, your spirit will die, and your words will seem to reach no living ear, shouted from the bottom of a sinking wet hole.

Our ire against thieves must be understood, and it will be in the detail of a curse wrought.

Purloiner of these pages, may you be skewered and fried and fed to those so desperate they do not identify their meat, and whom strip their meat of names and titles should it have them.

May you garden in shards of glass, with only lead onions to harvest, and be only rewarded with them when you can uproot with nothing but your bloody wrist nubs and set them down away from the glass.

May your sword run black with ink and turn into a brush when you most need a sword; your enemy will strike you apart while you write your pleas for mercy, each becoming a laughable relic when stained with your blood.

May your bedfellow secret serpents into your sleeping presence, free to envenom your body and dreams alike.

May you find calamity upon the road, and have all your bones and organs trampled by the horse and cattle that pass until you are of the dirt: a smear too indistinct to draw remark.

May a fissure develop in your nethers, and from it you will birth discharges of diseases you never had to catch, but are caught from you instead. May your bedfellow witness and reject you in horror. Only the diseases will call you parent, and celebrate you when they claim the title of plague.

May a smart tiger injure you and leave you in a clearing, your miserable squeals to serve as bait for better prey. Slowly you will die, and many times it will use you, keeping your wound open with a claw. You will have to eat your own kind, left from its meals, just to continue on as this wretch.

May you boil in the sun, not under it.

May two arrows, fired across the world, change direction as the compass needle does and each find one of your eyes.

May your bones be rearranged to arthritic catacombs.

May a rhinoceros find your bung fascinating. It will obsess him as the alchemist obsesses over a blotch of gold in a brick of lead.

May you become fixated upon this tale until your mind reads it when it is not there, when you have long discarded it to hide the evidence of your crimes. Its pages will stick to your back and not peel, its characters will join you when you bathe, in the forms they took after the page of death, and look into your eyes while you wash, blaming you for their fate. Its burned words will forever be in your palms, and when you flex them the page will turn and they will burn closer to the end.

This is your curse for trying to own this book with your hands, or for trying to master it with your own words. It does not belong with you, to you. Let it pass through you without greed. You can hold the hide, but nothing else. You are supposed to be empty enough to desire the contents, you fool.

And so, cursed or no, continue.

Hole

Do not die underground. That is what they say. Goodly Gods live in the sky, clear of the gnarled grabbing hands of filthy lowly man. They look down and witness death, descending to take righteous spirits to join them in endless gardens of cloud. If you die underground they do not see. If you die underground you fall into your grave. There you remain. Only those lower than the lowly will ever take note.

Four thousand people did not heed this wisdom. Two thousand of them were under the banner of Sovereign Reyvathird, and had marched into the mouth of Wormskoll Cave with no intention of dying. What they intended was the taking of the cave itself, and of the frosty iron gates deep within. Through those bars man and demon and Subtlerrannean god could barter and bargain. Poisons and potions could change hands, but no bodies, and no possessing spirits. Continue reading →

Declaration: Gibberish Mire (Finale)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ Leave a comment

(estimated reading time: 53 minutes)

Where!?

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Wagonher encompassed a pointy all-in belt, wagnered Knowrth the way to tavendor’s keyp, iffin it haddocked otherplatz on staggburred drunk ledggs. Theire might be founded and won ormbinous avoid: hole filled with punch that used to were the bodd of Hamsandcans Glammount. Asquerying locales how two reconvict themtwain was her gaol, a seedcret to be retilled in Pursuit of grown pease. Continue reading →