The Emerald Isle on SubscribeStar.art

A single grave is a tragedy.

A hundred graves is a story.

A thousand graves is a yard.

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“Are you ready, daddy?”

Josimer glanced down into the twinkling ambers of his little lady’s eyes. “I’m terrified,” he replied, in a voice twice as tight as the hand-me-down three-piece suit from his brother’s second-hand heaps.

Little Ellizen’s freckle-speckled cheeks puffed with frustration. “That’s not what I said!”

Her father chuckled and ruffled her head, upsetting tiny curls made of gossamer and gold.

Up and out of bed, even before the sun, Father and daughter jostled side-by-side on the observation car, clung to its twisted wrought-iron railings as the city finally came into view, beneath a yawning blue-time sky.

“As ready as I can be, my little gem.”

Born from stubborn stock, Elli reached out to grab her fathers’ three smallest fingers. The most she could fit in her hand all at once. “Smile. It’s a good day.”

The locomotive whistle screamed for everyone to come and see the show, just as Josimer clicked the lid of his pocket clock to find that, just as all things in the Cordus Empire did, their route was perfectly on time.

In fact, all was very nearly as it should be…

“Elli, baby…” The most wonderful voice in the world cut the tension up behind them. “Perhaps when you have seen seven years of life, then you can speak to your father so boldly.”

Josimer did as his daughter wished, watching his wife pick her up to better catch the view.

“Your papa’s gonna make the world shine, you know.”

Wrapped in matching evergreen dresses, their spotted porcelain skin and golden Telyrian-clan eyes matched the drapes like strings of gilded lace.

…and now the world was right as rain.

The train cried out across the viridian foothills, train-tracks rounding a hairline dirt-curtain bend. Sunrise shined upon a sea of ancient granite-brick buildings cowering beneath a hundred towering monoliths, forged from Cordus stone, steel, and brass.

Capital of the world. Prized gem of the highest crown.

The one untouchable place, in a world united by tides of gold and fire.

Chrysos, the city that would never fall.

Czzrrk. “Wealth-and-health, travelers! Welcome, one and all, to our most illustrious home,” the Head Conductor announced with a tin-can trumpet voice. “As we approach Goldengate Station, please keep your children behind the railing, stack your things outside your cabin door, and relax as our esteemed serfs bring your luggage to the landing platform.”

He stayed watching the glowing smoke-stacked metropolis, holding the two most beautiful ladies in the whole wide world against his chest. Not that they had much to pack. They weren’t very well-to-do. Not yet, anyway.

But soon enough, as the landscape was wiped away by that blurry visual mush of chiseled-brick walls passing by at ninety miles an hour, he took them both back for the most exciting part of their voyage to the heartland.

Czzrrk. “Thank you for your cooperation, ladies and gentlemen. Please remain seated as the locomotive comes to a complete stop.”

The sound of metal striking metal rang on all sides as massive brassen clasps, connected to giant spring-loaded coils of chain, caught stopping-brackets forged into the rear-car frame. The whole structure creaked and wobbled, rattling to the sound of spooling chains and hissing locomotive breaks.

Ellizen screamed with her ears cupped as the wheels locked and stopped, shedding sparks around the rails that lit the darkened junction tunnel as their train coasted towards their final destination.

As the train came to rest with a great steaming sigh of relief, the voices of a few grumpy fallen passengers nearby left Jo wondering why they hadn’t warned people about that more ahead of time.

Outside, a bestial rumble of the throat shook the sliding cabin door. “Is this everything… sir?”

The voice, so deep it rumbled in the chests around it. Unmistakable.

There, peeking through the cabin shutters, was the piercing red horizontal-slit eyes of The Enemy. Josimer’s blood froze to ice as he reached for that old cap-fired derringer he never thought he’d need hiding in the lining of his pants. “S-stay back!”

Horns that spiraled down and around their neck, char-black fur that swallowed the daylight whole, goat-like snout chuffing hot with irritation as it opened its mouth to speak again… showing off a mouth full of pearly canine fangs.

“I said… Is this everything? …sir”

Josimer’s blood slowly thawed as he reminded himself that things were different since the early days. At least this far into the influence of His Majesty’s court.

This was not ‘The Enemy’ any more. He was a serf, whose rights had been signed away the moment his people dared to spill Chordite blood on her own sacred soils. Traditional garments, weapons, and armor traded for an ill-fitting scarlet vest and a tiny bell-hops hat. A proud warrior race, now made to serve the meek. In every inconceivable way.

“Ah… yes. Yes it is.” Josimer swallowed the breath he’d been holding as the words escaped his lips. “Thank you.”

A grunt, and then his great, clawed, furry paws gripped the handles of their flower-print luggage. “This way… please.”

His mighty cloven-hooved stomps rattled the ground in line with a dozen others of his kind, each marching their own clients down the platform steps.

Josimer and Thela, husband and wife, huddled close together with their daughter smooshed between them as the monstrous serf plopped their baggage down and lurched around to face them. “Will that be… all?”

It took an uncomfortably long time for Jo to formulate a polite response. “Yes, ah… May you have a pleasant day.”

The giant looked at them both, then to their little girl as she slipped between their knees to give the beast a big full-armed hug around the coal smoke fur of his calf.

“Thanks, Mr. Man!” Ellizen said with a glowing juice-box smile.

The beast chuffed, shaking his cheeks like he meant to clear his mind of something bad, and patted the little girl’s head instead. “It may be a good day… soon.”

Her mother and father very nearly died inside, scrambling to the monster’s feet to collect their little girl. “Yes thank you goodbye now,” they said in perfect unison, clamboring their bags away as Ellizen waved ‘the help’ goodbye.

Papa leaned into little Elli’s ear just as soon as all the beasts had finished, huffing and puffing and helping little-old-ladies down the stairs, then disappeared behind a slate-gray serf-staff wall. “Elli, you mustn't be so kind with such creatures. It’s far too dangerous.”

His daughter’s lips tightened, worried she might have gotten in trouble. “Why?”

Thela pulled the girl up off her feet as the whole family was swept up into a river of unfamiliar coats, smoke, and busy-making bodies. “Because you don’t know who they might be.”

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Josimer and his family gawked at the building tops like mountains in their scale. From a distance they were impressive, like a model on a miniature landscape might in its creativity and craftsmanship. Standing at the walkways, like ants beside the sole of a man’s boot, it left a person breathless. With combustion exhaust as well as grandeur.

He was not an engineer, so he couldn’t even begin to fathom the modern miracles required to secure the twenty-four inch C-Steel beams thrusting their incalculable storeys up into the sky.

But, as an Artisan, he understood every fleck of marble, brass, plaster and glass decorating their soulless metal frames into the opulent palaces looming around them. Every process, every strike of the chisel, scrape of the knife, and delicate brushing stroke; he knew what was needed to transform miserable oppressive industry into magnificent impressive luxury.

And the many unfinished behemoth buildings being erected off into the distance meant that he would get to prove it, many many times over.

It frustrated his family greatly as he stopped to appreciate every random this-or-that beautiful something-or-other hanging off of somebody-else’s property. His wife held her tongue, this was his calling in life after all, and why not look at the place you’ve traveled so far to see? His daughter though, well… six years of patience is not at all very much.

“I’m hungry!” she whined, fists balled up at her hips with puckered lips.

Josim gave his daughter her hundredth pat of the shoulder, scribbling notes into a little pad of paper from his jacket as his eyes scanned a roaring-lion statuette carved into a marble column. “Just a bit longer, deare—”

“HUNGRY!” she shouted, stomping her little slippers down in defiance, curls springing around her cheeks with impatient rage.

Thela giggled into the tips of her fingers as Josimer gasped at Elli’s outburst.

“I’m not so good at reading time-pieces, darling, but I dare say the sun has crept plenty through the sky.” She fanned her face as a thousand horseless carriages rattled and popped along a river of pollution and bi-directional chaos. “And I think we all could use a spot of something… not so out in the open.”

Jo checked his clock again, and chose not to admit just how much time he’d made them wait. “Right. Yes, I daresay we’re, ah… right on time!” he smiled, grateful that his professional interests had wandered them half-a-block away from their intended destination. Truly, exactly as intended.

Another hulking monster, with a single cyclops eye, dressed in freight-car capacity suspender pants and a giant pinstripe vest, blared his copper horn as a crowd gathered at the corner to cross. His partner across the street responded by manually turning a heavy crank that flipped a three-sided sign from “GO” to “WHOAH!” and finally to “STOP”.

The endless stream of shining brass and iron boxes, piloted by folks of decent means, stopped with irritation in their many honking horns, and the family gave the creature a wide berth as they crossed. They’d heard a hundred tales of soldiers made to watch as their dismembered limbs were barbecued and eaten one by one. Even so, some local folks tossed a copper coin or two into the creature’s bathtub-sized hat left at his naked feet.

Those repaying their debts to society were undeserving of a good man’s salary, but tips for a job well done build character, some might say.

Mother and daughter both held their breaths as the sight of a wall of glimmering, blinking, sideshow lights beckoned them around to a veritable cathedral of capitalism that swallowed four entire city blocks. The rotating door archway, one of twelve, was carved from slabs of milky jade, in the image of dragons curled up to meet snout-to-snout. A style copied from the heathen temples of the Monsurians, defeated some two-hundred years before.

He stopped to point the giant lizards out, happy to find the magnificence and colorful lights finally overcame her desire for sugar and carbs. “You see those, darling?”

Elli gave a timid, bashful walk towards them with his palm beckoning her forth. “Yes?”

He pointed out a tiny flowing ribbon sculpted towards the bottom. “Each of these dragons has a name. Can you read this one?”

Elli gave a confident nod and squatted so her dress bloomed out all around her.

With a squint she read, “E… L… L… I…”

Her mother turned with a smirk, trying not to give away her husband’s big surprise.

It took a long patient time before she finished and brewed on it in her head, gasping with a shiver down her little spine. “It’s my name!”

She squealed with tiny tears in her eyes, attracting a crowd of onlookers that weren’t entirely sure what this commotion was about, but glad to see a happy commotion all the same.

Josimer was sure this must be the finest feeling any man could ever have, a hundred times more pleasant than the stiffest drink he could possibly afford.

“It won’t be the last,” he said, fallen to his knees, hugging her tightly, having totally forgotten the hundreds of hours spent chiseling and sanding half-inch scales in stone.

His wife had only laid eyes on the work in tiny chunks as she peeked in on visitation days during his apprenticeship. To see them in their glory, snarling down at the public with glowing, scarlet, lightbulb eyes, it served as proof to all the doubters in her life that Josimer Gladehall was no dead bet.

He gestured up to the bigger sign, twinkling with sin-city lights. “Now, what does that say, my lady?”

Thela smirked. “Like I don’t know the illustrious Orient of Fire, darling.”

He pointed right back at her with Ellizen perched on his bicep like a treasure chest. “And where do you think we’ll be staying this week?”

That drew the color from her cheeks. “No.”

Ellizen squealed with joy, finally able to release the pressure of holding in her life’s biggest most important secret. “Yes!”

That reaction garnered applause from the crowd around them. Half of them expected the man to take a knee and propose; and he would have, if you really could marry a person twice, that is.

Thela peeked through the spinning glass entryway. Once a vault door, whose contents were accessible only to the chosen few with keys granted by the right sort of parentage, or the craziest luck of the draw. Now a portal to luxuries she may never receive again, but that she’ll keep and remember forever.

“The guild offers this to all their graduates, love. I’ve earned it…” Josimer clasped his wife’s hand. “We’ve earned it. You and me.”

Thela walked up to her man and pushed against him, just as much as was acceptable in the most open of spaces. “I love you, Josimer.”

He placed a kiss upon her lips, like he didn’t care if anyone was there. The few flubbering guffaws from the old-timers in the crowd were drowned out by the many awws.

Jo reached into his pocket, for an envelope made of hand-crafted venison hide parchment, addressed in hand-brushed ink made from hand-crushed serpent-crystal pigment. ‘For Brother Josimer and his Immediates.’

He reached inside for a tiny golden key, and handed it to a man behind a one-way wall of tinted cannonproof glass.

Czzzrk. “Good to see you, Mr. Gladehall. We’ve been expecting you.”

The golden revolving door finally started turning, and he led his family through.

The inside was more illustrious than he could possibly have imagined. It wasn’t that everything was made from imported jade and gold, though the place most certainly was. No, it was the artistry of everything.

In his studies he was shown sculptures of immense value, made from base materials that should have been seen as trash in any other context. Then, he witnessed a master commit to making solid-gold atrocities so hideous that everybody present wished the metal could be melted down and returned to the earth for a second chance at life.

For five long years, nearly as long as his daughter was alive, he’d lived a religion of beauty in form. It just delighted him to find the materials used were splendid too.

Unlike his daughter outside, however, Josimer didn’t balk as she ogled at the many hundreds of stone-clad busts holding the walls up; roaring dragons, crying phoenixes, screeching tetricals, and dozens of other exotic beasts that man had either tamed or kept at bay.

All to the sound of glowing, vacuum-tube, radio stacks playing broadcast imperial tabernacle choir songs.

Eventually, though, they made their dazzled ways to the dining hall, and were pleased to see that their imaginations had so many things left to learn.

Inside the massive four-metropolitan-city-blocks of ground floor, was a network of black-bricked colosseum walkways. Dug deep into the earth, looking down upon an atrium of species native to a land absolutely not its own, birds of paradise invited them in with pleasant woodwind cries.

This yawning edifice was so wide and deep that clouds formed and wafted away from the sheer scale of the humidity required to keep it all alive. Trees, grasses, animals, roaring man-made waterfalls that crashed down into replicated waterways full of fish he had never seen. Greenhouse sunlight rays basking down upon an ecosystem that simply didn’t belong, and yet it surely belonged to someone now.

His wife and child both needed to be walked by the hand to keep from bumping into other people as a white-coated reptilian with blazing eyes and golden scales approached. There to guide them, driving a carriage pulled by giant lizards, bridled up so their sunset dewlap colors were forced out on constant display, of course.

The drive to their table would take ten whole minutes, since they had been given a lower class reservation way over on the other side. Not that anyone was complaining.

“M-Mr… Um…” Ellizen muttered, reaching for the tails of their driver’s silken suit coat.

“-sssss,” the creature hissed in a gentle, patient, but irritated tone.

“Oh? What is it, Elli?” Thela prodded, encouraging her daughter at such an opportune time.

The little girl perked back up. “You’re very pretty.”

“Ssssss,” the reptilian’s body stayed facing the way the carriage was driving as their long shining neck flipped completely around to look the little girl in the face.

Josimer gave a weak, humiliated chuckle at his daughter’s faux pas. “Oh, my apologies sir. I think you mean ‘handsome’, darling.”

The driver shook her head towards the man with barely disguised disdain, then gave a tired appreciative nod to his daughter in response. “Thanksssss.”

Josimer figured he could be forgiven. Sunbaskers all looked the same anyways.

At least this place didn’t require their females to stuff their shirts like some other establishments. That always came across as just a bit too much, y’know?

His daughter might as well have been the one ordering for them, considering how high-brow every single item sounded. They didn’t want to humiliate themselves and so, after a whisper shared between the two of them, they let Ellizen order for everybody after all.

They didn’t remember the name of anything that came served to them on those sizzling granite platters. But if flavor was a language they could speak, they’d surely order it all again. Elli was a picky eater, unfortunately for her, and so she had to wait just a little longer for her consolation plate of cheese and crustless sandwich squares.

The time came for them to decide what to do with their time in the Orient of Fire, but then a rogue concierge made things just a little bit… interesting.

“Madame,” the old man smiled on approach with an energy unbecoming of his age. “Monseuir.”

His teeth were as straight and white as the polished walls erected behind him.

“Could we interest you two in a little bit of privacy?”

What a strange and uncomfortably personal question.

“Pardon?” Josimer puffed, looking right and left, concerned that he may have offended someone just a bit too well-to-do watching just a bit too much.

The concierge chuckled in defeat, backing off like a fisherman giving slack to better reel in his catch. “Pardon me, though I suppose nobody has let you know that your package includes a ticket to the Lotus Palace for that lovely little lady over there.”

Ellizen slunk behind her mother’s knees as the man gestured her way.

“And… what is that exactly?” Thela asked, anxious but with her curiosity thoroughly piqued.

“A full day of activities, entertainment, and refreshments. The finest caregivers.” He glanced back at Ellizen. “Dozens of other kids looking for someone to play with. All under the care of the most alert and devoted security the empire can provide.”

Josimer’s jaw dropped with an incredulous raise of the brow…

“No, this is not a joke,” the hotel officer said, gesturing to a long line of kids being guided by a team of feline ladies into the carriage of that same lizard-lady driver from before.

…and then the tickle of his wife’s fingers weaving through his own took the words right out of his gaping mouth.

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A headboard, carved into networks of snakes biting at each others’ tails, smacked glimmering black walls with the singular neolithic beating tune as old as time itself. Electric candles flickered and lit drapes of silk woven with foreign geometric patterns that Josimer had yet to study.

“Don’t you dare leave me barren, Jo!” Thela shouted into his tired sweating face with her silken-white flower-stitch bra swung below her breasts like empty hammocks in the wind.

Circled by a nest of bunched-up emerald-stalk cotton blankets, green as their namesake stone, his throbbing wanting member dove in-and-out of that warm, wet, rightness of his wife’s spoiled-rotten dignity…

He decided the drapes could wait for now.

Josimer grunted, growling with his dress shirt hung up and over his shoulders with buttons popped loose from impatience, his pants and underwear somewhere that he didn’t really care, groaning half as loud as the carpentry suffering beneath their sinful bodies. “The–la…”

“Yesss!” Her hair, unwound and spilled like molten gold across the sheets, swirled as her thrice-bitten neck curled back with pleasure to the carnal slopping sounds between their legs.

The bed posts, formed into clutching peregrine talons, clawed the carpet in a desperate attempt to keep the mattress in place.

To no avail.

Both people aboard the bed that had slowly sailed away from the wall had been reduced to animals in heat, both shuddering with sweat dripping down their faces as he plunged deep and came inside her for the second time that night.

Thela gasped as her husband’s wonderful love filled her womb and his lips stroked the pulsing veins of her neck. “Oh… Oh, Jo…”

He kept himself inside like that, half to get a break and half because he didn’t want to waste a single drop of seed. “Hope’n for a son?” He didn’t dare disappoint his wife with a mandate like this one on the books.

She chuckled as a little bit of his seed leaked out and ran down into the sheets, touching his nose with a long carefully-manicured nail. “Make sure he gets those pretty eyes of yours, sir.”

Jo pulled himself out of her, slowly, chest huffing with hairs that curled like strips of shaven ebony wood on his chest. “What now, need another dose?” he asked, with a breathless bit of hope she might just relent.

Thela chuckled, turning over to squint with that sly feminine wile she only showed in moments like these. Few knew it, but she was a fox hidden in a coat of fleece, the only vicious predator he’d let live in the orchard of his heart. “Maybe.”

Josimer smiled, praying it was still in jest. “Mercy, My Lady.”

She hummed, mollified by the buzz of a dozen orgasms, moving to situate her comfy clothes back on.

Then he reached for her, slipped into nothing but his pinstripe boxers and a ruined sunday shirt, with that wild expression again. “May we try something else?”

His wife grinned up at him, acting like she needed to consider the thought. “Oh? Like what?”

The Artisan rushed to his luggage, unbagging a canvas he’d framed and stretched just before they left, and one of the many gifts given to him… a full-spectrum set of Fluxcolor Paints.

Fluxcolors were rare and difficult-to-produce, forged from pigments made with ingredients that sounded like fairy-tale things. Phoenix feathers, living crystals, the shells of mollusks so poisonous they could kill a dozen men with a pluck.

All the strange modern alchemies done upon these pastes of nature's splendor resulted in colors able to be chemically altered with six included admixtures. They could shift hue and shade, change texture, even glow, under specific conditions; temperature, sunlight, angle of view, a dozen others he barely knew how to do yet.

Such tools had produced the most vivid, intricate, nuanced, deeply-layered masterpieces known to man. Only the richest of fools could afford such a thing… and only the most trusted of practitioners could be given them for free. He had shown promise in the eyes of a master during his apprenticeship, and they had left him with their abandoned third set standing around collecting dust.

“I am not tired, you know intercourse only fills me with life.” He grinned, popping open the box to lay his tools out upon a bedstand he’d kidnapped for the dubious honor of becoming his substitute workbench. “Let me paint you.”

A look of surprise crossed the face of his vixen in disguise. “Didn’t you say those are precious, darling?”

He planted a tender peck upon her lips, with words that struck her nerves like thunder. “Only half as precious as you, but they will do.”

So he carefully sat her comfy on the bed, with her breasts laid bare, draped in ropes of emerald cloth, backed with wood in a finish that shined like Kaius River gold. His lover. His muse. Half of everything he cared about most. The one who’d seen the light inside him all those years ago.

Josimer left the blinds drawn. He didn’t need the lanterns of the outside world when the afterglow of their consummation lit the way.

It was a long silent time, spent listening to the other’s breathing, but magic is often made in the darkest, quietest places, isn’t it?

And Thela knew she couldn’t move, but that didn’t stop her from making faces, just to see him squirm.

“Jokes on you,” Josimer jabbed back with a smirk as he blessed each stroke of his brush across the canvas with one of a thousand silent, memorized, artisanal chants. “I don’t paint the face first.”

His vulpine was ready to joust as she kept her body still and sound. “I heard that’s bad practice.”

“Only with an obedient subject,” he replied, streaking golden oil-color strands of hair across freshly painted shoulders, and started mixing the exact shades of tan, pink, red, and brown to bring her nipples into reality twice. “You, my dear, are a wild thing.”

She sighed in reply. “The hunter knows his quarry, it seems.”

He did not reply, he’d entered the zone. That place where colors replaced feeling, lines replaced thought, where planning begat beauty instead of human deceit. Autotelia, they called it, and he experienced it so very little when his wife was away. But after his ceremony tomorrow, those moments would become so very rare.

He’d only just finished the radiance of her locs, everything else around, leaving a gaping white hole in the face of his subject, before a delicate doorbell chime rang his skull.

“Coming!” Thela shouted and giggled, rising to the occasion as her husband sat dumbfounded, staring into the void like a man struck across the brow with a lead-filled sap. She put her nightgown on, did her best to hide the evidence of their debauchery, and peeked through the fish-eye peephole lens in the door.

There in the hallway, escorted by a pair of colorfully uniformed guards, was their daughter, accompanied by a female with the face of a lion in a white-aproned dress. A human organizer waited by the door, starched-and-pressed so tight that, if they bent too fast, might have snapped themselves in half.

Her daughter looked disappointed, but exhausted, as the lioness carried Ellizen in her arms, paws patting the little girl’s back with tender-loving care.

The door clicked open and she put her proper lady’s smile on for the world again, though her makeup had been left somewhere between decency and the bed. “Looks like somebody is tired, isn’t she?”

“She is lovely little lady, Ellizen is, yes,” the creature said with a muzzle unused to human words, but overwhelmed with very human looking feelings. “Would make my own cub if I could.”

“Goodnight, Miss Yeezarah,” Ellizen said, speaking the lioness’ proper name in a way that made her golden eyes water back with joy. “I hope I can see you and all the kids again.”

“As the sun meets the sea, little one,” she replied with a matrilineal glimmer in her slivered honeydew eyes, and a sway of her paint-brush-tufted tail. “If you–”

“That's enough, Jizzara,” the handler tisked the nonhuman caretaker with a click of their pocket-clock lid, and tore Ellizen away, returning the child to her rightful owners with ruthless efficiency. “Sorry about that, their kind can be quite emotional at times. All part of the package, I assure you.”

“Good evening you three, the breakfast chariot comes at the first floor elevator every half-hour.”

Thela winced a little as the door closed. She’d always liked the Pride-eye folk, and it made her uncomfortable seeing one so pleasant shunted aside like a disobedient child. With little luck, she was sure, they would be the first nonhumans to have full citizenship granted to them, then perhaps she wouldn’t have to stay her tongue so readily.

“Is everything ok?” Josimer said, finally coming back to his senses as the light of creativity left his eyes.

His wife shook the feeling away as her daughter snored atop her shoulder blade. “Everything’s perfect, darling.”

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“Are you ready, Jo?” she whispered into his ear as the light of gods-amongst-men sliced him in half through a tiny crack in the backstage curtains.

“No.” He looked down, then back at her with twitching nonconviction. “How is–”

“Elli is in good paws, worry not, my beloved.”

Josimer’s face screwed up at the misturn of phrase. “Good… wha?”

She chuckled. “The hotel’s private babysitting had a few options, and that nice Pride-eye woman from last night was available again.”

He nodded, hearing the cheers honoring the first graduate ahead of him presenting a three-dimensional landscape ‘painting’ knitted from multicolored yarns. Truly visionary in ways that made him blush.

Thela smirked, leaving a lipstick mark for her man to wipe away from his cheek in her absence. “Well, good luck with that, darling. Don’t stand there too long, I want to see you in the limelight.”

He swallowed his fear, pride, and whatever else happened to be choking him dead, clutching the pipelighter box in his pocket as that second-in-line unveiled a massive trio of gemstones cut with rounded facets sparkling like drunken starlight, even from his disadvantageous angle.

The Emperor often came to see the Artisans Guild in their graduations, but there had been an urgent military concern that kept him tonight. However, as it just so happened, the king of the southeastern quarter, one of the many minor rulers just beneath the imperial crown, was a consummate fan of the arts and had decided to take up the duty in his absence.

Even beneath the lesser brightness of King Shaelbe’s light, shielded by the vanta-black velvet of the back-stage curtains, it felt like his skin was busy peeling off like wasted laminate strips.

His best powder, wash, and dress, thankfully spared the fury of his wife’s hunger the night prior, felt like used burlap napkins wrapped around an unwashed corpse as the crowd cheered for the Jeweler ahead.

“And our final graduate, from the far far county of Tanethsdale in the western quarter. He’s well rounded, but don’t let that fool you, dear citizens! A master of one is often outdone by the man with a thousand hands. Please give a blazing warm welcome toooooo… Brother Josimer Gladehall!”

He gawked with a horrified gasp.

Why in the great infinite hells would they talk me up like—

The cheers erupting beyond pulled him through the curtain, like a puppet out from the facade, dangling like a dummy with nothing but hope that the master moving him knew what they were doing.

He squinted with one hand shielding his eyes beneath the four terawatt sunlight bulbs buzzing in the hands of burly leather-gloved stagemen he couldn’t see. Then, as his sight finally adjusted to the glory raining down upon his undeserving muppet body, his fingers found the whittled wooden toggles of his coat and he snapped back into focus.

The grand imperial demonstration hall, sculpted in an old traditional vinery style, had been wrapped in purple velvet and golden filigree, from floor to wall to ceiling. Chandeliers sparkling with rainstorms of hand cut diamonds screamed with thunder from a thousand clapping hands. Two of which mattered more than any others, connected to someone grinning in the front row like she’d heard his name spoken on radio.

The announcer, hunched behind an officious mahogany desk, smiled into a massive wrought-iron microphone that grinned back at him like a pill-headed golem.

Nevermind, she HAD heard his name spoken on the radio. Oh gods, he wanted to puke.

C’mon, c’mon, say something stupid!

“Ladies and gentlemen thanks for being here!”

Ok, well, that could have been worse.

“I’m your last artisan of the night...”

Oh for the love of—

“But I doubt you’ll soon forget the things you see, for many more nights to come.”

The crowd leaned in at that. They had been stunned, wowed, and dazzled the entire evening. What more could this man of humble means possibly do to leave them more impressed than they already were? Indeed, already the service staff had been dispatched to fill the glasses of every member in the audience with an extra round of sparkling white wine, just in case.

A couple of youngsters in three-piece suits far nicer than his wheeled a marble display out with something… square hidden beneath a sheet of royal-blue silk.

“Citizens of Cordus.” He felt the tightness of his second-hand suit start to let up as the showman engine in his gut finally fired back to life. “Beneath us all is an eternity of secrets. The great Bed of Bones found beneath our feet all around the world proves that, no matter the simplicity, nothing is ever as it seems.”

Josimer grabbed a nub tied at the top, and the audience gasped in preparation for the greatest thing yet to be seen by man or woman or child as the veil was finally lifted.

What glimmered back at them was a two-foot by two-foot by two-foot cube, made of what looked like glass swirling with indiscriminate three-dimensional scribbling lines. Its form had been rendered with geometry so crisp it may as well have been computer generated upon the world, angles so sharp they cut reality in two.

They were impressed by the craftsmanship… but, this wasn’t a craftsman’s graduation, now was it?

Josimer took an even deeper breath as King Shaelbe, in his viewing booth above everyone else, peered from binoculars made of jewel-encrusted brass and polished quartz, beginning to scratch his chin and lean back with the worst short-term case of boredom he’d seen in a long time.

Thank the gods it didn’t chip in shipping.

“Within every mundane thing is a story, with a cast of people and places there to make it what it is.” He gestured up to the boys in the rafters and they blinked the lights down at him in the response.

Thank the gods they got my letters… hopefully the bribes too…

The audience’s eyes opened with intrigue, peering into the crystal cube with distance-squints, looking for some promised hidden something in his graduation piece.

Josimer allowed himself to feel just the littlest bit of confidence as his hands thrust out in a performative display, stepping aside for his own well-being. “And if you look hard within…”

A dozen electrical levers were flipped all at once, and the audience screamed with surprise as the lights went out cold, dark as the deepest ocean layers. In the murk, the whitest curtains the house could offer were drawn out flat behind the stage in a panorama during the blackout, and Josimer covered his face in preparation for what came next.

“...you might just miss the beauty hiding behind its creation.”

Four high-focus rays, so bright they could permanently destroy a man’s eyes with a peek, cracked to life. Their laser brights center-shone down onto the cube from the top, front, left, and right.

The entire stage was lit with a memorial, projected in crisp lines of black, gray, and white.

His entire life, his family’s life, the legacy of Gladehall House, researched three-hundred years before his own time, as far back as records he could acquire allowed. Laid bare for the world to see.

A hundred acres of wooded glade, pregnant with berry bushes ripe for domestication, being worked by the hands of a hundred Gladehall relatives meticulously recreated from photos, drawings, and journal descriptions.

The first estate, burned to the ground by feuding families around, being smothered with the brave bucket-passing hands of his great-great-great-grandelders.

The many strapping young Gladehall men, drafted to quell the beast-man hordes across the globe. Their worried faces, pulled from imperial draft photo records, had been painstakingly forged into ten-thousand carefully laminated layers of etched optical glass. Visible here and now, and never again.

His mother and father, farmers of an inherited plot of land, working hard in the field as their child carved pillars of wood with knives he’s made himself from bits of sharpened blacksmith scrap. Images drawn from the vast eidetic memory that left him sleepless with imagery night after night.

In the distance, an imperial talent scout spots the many wooden fetishes of temple spirits lining their property. Behind, the road is represented as a paper contract scroll unrolling into the future, paved with the verbatim promises every Artisan child gets when he begins his long walk to the capital city gates.

His Majesty’s Artisanal Academy, the ‘Palace of Form and Flourish’, that very one they reveled in now, rendered in grandiose towering perspective, loomed in all its architectural glory.

He and his fellow students, and the many mentors who’d informed upon his craft the most. Recreated from memories old and new, there were the most difficult of trials in his artisanal life so far; the casting forge, the pointillist tessellation mural, the crafting of stairs without dimension, the trial of marble reliefs sculpted without modern tools… the painting of his first god damn bowl of fruit, with its wonky banana that looked so much like a penis it left his class debating hidden meanings that weren’t even there.

Above it all, in the clouds, the Emperor’s face gazed down, copied from the best source he could find… the one singular time he’d laid eyes on the man in passing, crowned in black-lined sunlight rays.

The one final picture, center stage, was the finest photo his mind had ever taken to date. The birth of his first child, his Ellizen dear, cradled in the arms of a tired woman in a breast-feeding chair, whose material doppelganger sat soaking from the cheeks in the blackened audience sea.

“Keep your eyes on the things behind the slate gray wall,” he said, wiping stage-frightened tears away.

The spot-rays snapped off, and the lights faded the world back in, slowly returning the auditorium to its perfectly-formulated atmospheric splendor. “Or you might just miss the magic behind it all.”

Still, cold, breathless, quiet.

And then a single set of clapping hands, from up in the most expensive of seats, set the room on fire.

Josimer gasped like a man whose head had been held below the surface of an icy lake, smiling at his wife’s glistening masquera-streaked cheeks.

Had the celebration been half-a-step less rowdy, he might not have mistaken the air sirens being drowned out by the cries of warpath birds in the sky… or the song of talon-dropped munitions whistling down.

He walked closer to the back of the stage, anxious to rejoin his wife, and gave a low, slow, solemn bow goodbye. Not knowing that one motion would be the thing that saved his life.

The last picture he saw of his perfect life was a waterfall of fire and blackness dousing the audience out, roaring on the heels of a sound so loud and complete that it sent him straight to the darkest ring of hell.

\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/-\|/

…Crackling…

…Coughing…

…Screaming.

Gunshots in the distance woke Josimer with straps of pain as flames consuming the two-by-fours piled above his shoulders started moving to their second course. His clothes.

“W-whaaa?” He gagged as the smell of chemicals wilting, searing, decomposing from the walls coated his lungs with petrochemical tar. “AAAHHH!”

He lashed around, tossing shards of lumber and bits of molding around like a beached fish scattering pebbles in a desperate search for water. His smoldering coat was tossed aside, just in time for him to watch it swallowed in wreaths of inorganic copper-green flame.

The Artisan bent over in the shock of second-stage burns oozing beneath his dress-shirt back, and purged a five-star four-course lunch. Like an angel with its wings stripped and burned, whose piety had been pulled from the mouth after falling from the silver gates of Godhead far above.

“Heeee—” A man’s voice gagged in distress. “Heeelllp!”

Josimer wasn’t sure who that was, where he was, what was going on, how all this had happened. But, down inside of everyone not crippled by the poison of power is a neolithic man willing to reach a hand out to the stranger in need.

“I…” He hobbled up, hunching low to keep below the smoke. “...I’m c-cough-coming!”

He wandered onto a jagged spire scape of a splintered royal stage he didn’t quite remember. It was a gaping serrated maw of wooden fangs snagging his pants as he peered out upon a smoking field of ruin.

The great academy, where once perfection in the eye was the eternal ladder climbed… transformed to charred forests of heat-warped trunks of steel bent beneath a hailstorm of ancient hand-hewn bricks. He stood gawking up and out, into a chasm chewed out of the palace top. The sky, so filled with smoke the stars had vanished, soaked the moon in blood.

Like a mouse stood upon a bear-bitten wheel of cheese, he shrunk to nothing as massive arrowhead formations of gryphon-riders in the smog dropped sheets of iron rain deep into the cityscape. Great skyscrapers, once stabbing the sky into submission, fell like termite towers full of insects called people skittering from windows in their night-time clothes, hoping miracles waited below for the children screaming in their arms.

There, crawling through the oblivion crush, with his colorful attire shredded to spring-pole stringers, was the King, reduced to a crying blubbering cripple with his one un-broken limb reaching out for anything. Anything to bring this nightmarish reminder of mortality to a swift convenient end.

Josimer jumped from the stage, not knowing what his legs might find, unhappy to discover that panes of leaden glass made for a poor field of grass to tread.

“GAAAHH!” He screamed as shards of stained glass pane bled through the half-worn soles of his shoes. Fallen to his knees, the bones of his legs alerted him to the many hundreds of sharp angles the rubble had provided. Head and hands brought low, he came face to face with the shattered thing he’d worked so many years to complete. A life, once proudly on display, now sundered before his very eyes.

“Grrraaa!” The royalty in the distance growled, opening his eyes through the pain, just enough to see Josimer shuffling through the rubble towards him. “Y-you! You… Help, p-please!”

Josimer grabbed at the noble spectator’s pew Sh had sat upon that evening, now fallen and shattered over his back like a stack of twigs. “I-I’ve got you!” He didn’t know who this guy was, or care. He had a face, a living face that cried for him to come and do what needed to be done.

He heaved, creaking, roaring as the thing splintered apart, leaving knives of oak embedded in his wrists. He knelt, hoisting the belligerently heavy noble across his shoulder like a sack of late-season spuds.

He let the adrenaline rush carry them both toward what his brain had finally remembered were searchlight lanterns blinding him in the distance.

The King screamed in gratitude and agony. Josimer did not know the man’s legs and ribs and hand were broken, but it was this or the burning river styx behind them.

A group of constables found them minutes later, after accidentally drenching them both in firehose water, stopping to collect his Royal Highness first before taking him to a collection point somewhere else. To be led down into the sewers, where the bunkers from the old-wars had been moldering in wait for conflict to rise again.

“The enemy has saturated the sky,” a soldier told him in words he barely understood. “You’re coming with us.”

“Wha…huh?” Things were slowly coming back, things that mattered more than orders. “Where is…”

“Just over there, civilian, get a—”

“Thela!” He shrieked, realizing that he’d just walked across a field of roasted human corpses. Some of those jagged bits stabbing at his feet? Hands and bits of shattered bone. “My Theeela!”

Josimer leapt back toward the smog, and was yanked by the yellow crusted back of his shirt clutched in the hands of a couple hardened war-time professionals.

He was tackled down and summarily drenched with buckets of soiled water, until his senses finally came to. They told him it was a miracle he and that ‘very important man’ had made it out alive. They were the only survivors. That swarms of beast-man terrorists had purged the undestroyed halls with savage efficiency. So many other buildings too, the Oriente of Fire among them, laid to rubble and ash.

Chrysos had become a mausoleum, one whose tarnished memory would haunt the world forever.

Josimer wanted to go and find his daughter, in empty vainness of hope, but the soldiers holding him there threatened another therapeutic round of waterboarding if he decided to waste their time.

He listened with an empty head for what could have been an eternity, brain swimming through an ocean of fire, darkness, and pain… until someone finally said his name, “Josimer? Josimer Gladehall?”

The man blinked into the light of a handheld infantry bulb as the bombs cracking in the distance smacked him back awake, then woke him to this nightmare for good as he heard that unmistakable child’s sob.

“Pleeese, she is scared, sirs. Please, let me just—”

“Shut your FANGS, tree-pisser!” a soldier shouted down at a cowering silhouette with feline ears, his rifle pointed right between the eyes. “You’re lucky I hadn’t shot you. May still well, too!”

The man’s comrade approached, hand held out with sternness in his chin. “I said, are you Josimer?”

Jo stood, crying blood and soot as his child was torn from the lioness's arms by a third man wearing a big medallion hat, brandishing a pistol with a revolving wheel of hollow-point magnum rounds.

“This creature insists she was caring for this child and was going to bring her to you.” The man in-charge said with an incredulous laugh. “We caught her scavenging bodies up from the rubble. Is the child yours or shall we be on our way?”

Jo’s mind had cleared enough to look off into the distance, seeing columns of smoke standing where the Oriente of Fire once reached for the stars. His heart leapt as the hammer cock of the officer’s pistol, pushing against the singed fur of Yeezarah’s skull, snapped him into action.

“Y-yes!” he gasped, lying, but for whatever reason he didn’t know why. He couldn’t afford to keep a beast servant on his own, especially considering… wait, who would claim her now? The trouble he could get into just for pretending she was under his indenture…

“She’s mine…” he began to turn and run for the bunkers, but as Ellizen screeched over his shoulder, reaching back, begging the scary men not to hurt the crying lioness with steel-toed boots pressed against her back, he recognized that his wife must have seen the light in someone else.

Someone that had brought his daughter back to him from the grave.

“B-both of them!”

The commissar gave him a discerning squint, spat, and slooowly brought the hammer down with a harmless thumb reset. “Keep your serf’s registration on them next time, or we’ll shoot her where she stands.” He looked out into the devastation. “A lot of ungrateful animals needing put down, now, I reckon.”

Yeezarah pounced around Josimer’s chest, dripping with tears like a leaky basement pipe, hugging him with a strength he’d never been exposed to in his life before. A Prideye woman, motivated by the fear of children in harm and the threat of imminent death, could crush a man’s spine in two and her incomprehensible growling, roaring, foreign speech did little to soothe the injuries he’d sustained.

Indeed, she had taken some serious injuries too. Her paws were burned, her fur singed in bands shaped like industrial beams, tail crooked and bent in a ‘Z’. The lioness may as well have lifted a building with her bare paws getting Ellizen out…

Based on what that military man had just said, she very probably did.

“I… Maaa maaa” Elli sobbed as the frightening presence of the military guard stomped off, firing warning shots into the air at gangs of beast-men and hobo-human trash looting stacks of fallen society.

“I want maaa maaa!”

Josimer moved the three of them into a shambling line, behind a hundred other devastated lives.

“Me too, baby” he sighed, trying not to hear his daughter shrieking out for the broken piece of his heart left buried beneath the city that would never fall.

“Me too…”

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Hi there! I've got Chapter 35 of Forbidden Waters done. Thanks to my Guild Mates for their editin...

AAAnd it's finally done, the first of two stories of Spinel's past (character from Forbidden Wate...

Forbidden Waters - 34

Also readable on AO3, here:

Whole story starts here:(

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