THE SPACE BETWIXT

There’s here. That’s familiar. Towns and forests; roads and rivers. Death waits for the careless, but a simple sort of death. Knives. Teeth.

Then there’s the Elsewise. As changeable as the winds. Labyrinthine halls of antediluvian stone. A sea with stars below and eddying currents up above. Dream, Delusion, Delirium, Doom. A cluster of mirror worlds from whose grasp escape may prove impossible.

But also, there is the place where the two come together. Always a space betwixt. Beads of light and gleaming metal. Threads of copper running like golden veins through the fabric of reality. A nearly invisible ring of crystal where two slabs of stone fit too neatly together. Miss it and you might be hours along before you notice the difference. A burnt taste to the air. An unfamiliar color. A second sun dappling through the trees. By then it’s too late.

Be they reliquer, bountyman, outlaw or tramp--those that find themselves often at the corners of civilization learn to keep sharp for signs of Transience. To do otherwise would be suicidal.

Read More

CANOPIC LOOM

A funeral engine the size of a pair of cupped palms. Fibrous, iridescent carapace that reheals when split open. A placid face atop.

For the burial of stillborn princes.

Interred in the Loom, they are laid to rest in a stone vault the size of a grown man and brimmed with organic slurry. Over time, the Loom renders the liquified meat. It knits skin, stitches bone for the never-was king. Pristine muscle ripples under dead flesh. Regal hair sprouts roughly from a clammy scalp. Within the span of a single moon, a fully formed corpse lies in the grave, wearing a tranquil death mask and wielding a midnight black repeater & delicate blade of chitinous lustre.

Read More

RESTLESS NIGHTS

Humans, unsubtle as we are, have acquired a number of strange parasites in our time. Worms steal food from your gut. Ghouls steal bodies from the Graveyard. Leechfolk steal blood from their lovers. Botches steal your nightbreath while you sleep.

Short & squat, cloaked in tatters. Bird’s feet. Clay masks and copper rings braided through tangled hair. They live off of the dreams of men.

Read More

THE OCEAN'S EMBRACE

An island at the bottom of the sea, where She is broken into a second horizon with stale air and alien stars above; a twice-sized sun sinking into the eventide.

No one finds themselves idly upon these shores. This is the Ocean’s heart, and She guards it jealously. If She has brought something here, it was greatly coveted and greedily snatched. The sand is strewn through with sea-smooth gems. Towering stone faces rise unevenly from the dunes, staring out at a world that has forgotten to worship them. In the distance, the roots of the World Banyan knot into a tangled jungle devoid of all greenery. Who knows what forgotten treasures lie therein?

Even the people here are a pathetic sort of trove. A shadowbox of ceramic misfits, plucked from a world that didn’t want them and deposited here. Living Debris of the World Above.

Welcome to Glimmer’s Rim.

Read More