Fantasy
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The Weight of a Name
Trudy’s hands were always black. It wasn’t the kind of dirt you could scrub off with a bit of soap and a rough brush. This was the ink of the High Court: thick, greasy, and smelling of old copper. She worked in the basement of the Great Archive, a place where the steam pipes hissed…
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THE ARCHIVE OF NOTHING
Troy’s fingers hovered over the glowing glass tablet. He was sweating even though the room was freezing. The air in the Archive smelled like old meat and burnt hair. Above him, the God hung from the ceiling like a massive, weeping bruise. It was a giant ball of black ink and shivering eyes. It groaned,…
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The Blue Paint Panic
Beckett was sweating. It was not the kind of sweat you get from a nice walk. It was the kind of sweat you get when you are standing on a thin wooden board sixty feet in the air while a mob of angry people gathers below. In his left hand, he held a jar of…
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The Ink of Lost Things
Gabe sat at a small, scarred desk in the basement of City Hall. His fingers were stained a permanent, bruised purple. Being an ink-mage was not like the stories. There were no glowing wands or velvet capes. It was mostly back pain and the smell of old vinegar. His job was simple: he wrote the…
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The Price of a Blank Page
Silas knew the value of a man by the ink on his skin. To some, a tattoo was just a mark of a drunk night or a lost bet. To Silas, it was a ledger. He was an ink-mage, once a high clerk in the marble halls of the capital. Now, he lived in the…
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The Hollow in the Throat
I keep my back to the wall. That is the first rule of staying alive in this city. If you stand in the middle of a room, you are a target. If you walk down the center of the street, you are inviting the Collectors to take a look at your throat. I learned that…
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The Wick of Yesterday
Marcus couldn’t remember what his brother Mick’s voice sounded like. That was the first thing the lamps took. It happened on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, he didn’t even remember if Mick liked apples or pears. The city needed light, and light needed fuel. In this city, fuel wasn’t wood or coal. It was the stuff…
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The Weight of the Black Glass
Hank checked the seal on his rubber mask. The air in the lower stacks tasted like copper and old sweat. In this city, you didn’t pay for bread with gold. You paid with the time you spent at your grandmother’s house or the way your first dog smelled after a rainstorm. The rich people bought…
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The Teeth in the Dark
The hum is the worst part. It sounds like a million bees trapped inside a lead pipe. It vibrates in my teeth and makes my eyeballs itch. That hum means the Collectors are close. They are coming for the only thing I have left: the memory of the night the cellar door clicked shut and…
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The Solid Light of the Poor
The machine hissed. It sounded like a giant pot of water boiling over on a stove. I sat in the dark of the Archive, my stomach growling loud enough to wake the dead. I’m Omar, and my job is to file the thoughts of people who are too broke to keep them. In this city,…