Stories

One-off stories and stories which were not explicitly serialized.

Warning: Under no condition may any warform be exposed to Item 259 or its byproducts. If deployed against Empire’s enemies, all measures must be taken to prevent their warforms from being exposed. Other contamination must be contained and excised per standard protocol.

Precautions: Remade, Veiled, and Burnt individuals appear immune to Item 259’s influence, as are all awoken bearers of Empire’s bloodline. All other individuals are susceptible. Exposure may be prevented by combined hazardous material and hazardous information precautions, and treated by immediate¹ soulburn and sterilization.

Read on … ( ~2 Min.)

empire

Empire grew in blood and greed, but the exuberance of its youth soon gave way to a colder cruelty.

The history of Empire—there is only ever one, and only one who did not grow in the shadow cast by its death would claim not to know it—is fraught with danger. Even the most theoretical study of its contours risks stumbling upon an old taboo, a deadly truth wrapped in undying chains by ghoul-kings who feared the touch of sunlight upon their sins.

Read on … ( ~8 Min.)

empire

Empire’s shadows linger long after the last pyre has fallen to ash.

It is well known, to those of a certain disposition, that the ruins of the old watchtowers are attended still by the ghosts of the soldiers who gave their lives to the belief that a piece of land—a pile of rock—would protect their fellows from some distant enemy, uncaring of the internal foes that starved their supply lines and drained their spirits.

Read on … ( ~3 Min.)

Time Should Heal

Every night your restless dreams lead you back there again, and every night the wound is renewed. It’s been decades since your body walked in that hallowed place, the labyrinth carved and filled; decades since your skin felt the dripping heat and your stomach clenched at the smell of the dead saints and the stars wheeled above.

Time should heal wounds. The therapists certainly think so; they think you’re unhealthily obsessed, unwilling to let go, unwilling to let yourself grow beyond the memory. They blame you. They don’t understand. Each night the memory is made anew, each night you are once again the things which were done to you and the things which you did—the things you were made to do, they’d say. A small rephrasing. A lie.

Read on … ( ~2 Min.)

Dedicate Your Death To Me

“Dedicate your death to me,” the necromancer whispers. “Be mine to move and use, now and forever.”

She pauses to listen for an answer. Corpses don’t speak, of course, but she hears their answer in the slow flux of fungal rot and the chewing maggots, and so her army grows.

Thick, slimy marrow drips down from spongy calcium. The corpse is long past needing it, and the dirt is always hungry, and so it must be purged of life’s unnecessary remains.

Read on … ( ~2 Min.)

Next Deal

This is the deal that you will make with the endless void in the moment of your death: you will fill it with the fruit of your soul, and when you have nothing more to give you will be part of it.

The void is as large as the world and as small as a teaspoon, and at first it does not seem like such a hard thing to fill it. Perhaps you will last longer than your predecessor.

Read on … ( ~1 Min.)

Nothing Awaits Beyond

When the generation ship Seeker arrived at the galaxy’s edge, it found a marble stela half-buried in the void’s velvety fabric. The ship’s crystal-mind anchored itself there while it began to wake the carbon-minds who formed its crew: the technicians and choice-makers and void-watchers and reconcilers who did all the things which it could not, and who were set to be awakened anyway to celebrate the start of the ship’s true voyage—to look out upon the radiation-scoured emptiness which divided them from the Sculptor’s luminous beacon, twelve million light years away and nearly as ancient.

Read on … ( ~2 Min.)