EPIC

Stone places, to last for centuries, to withstand rage and fire.



Lux is a Sivdu, an elemental of fire. He is young, delighted with the sheer force of his existence. His people inhabit the wilderness of Mixar; they have ruined and left barren the white plains and dense wood of the Arient. Elementals cannot coexist.



fire crackles, alive and evil, snapping at the moon, the full moon, the cool, white belly of the night.

night brilliance of her skin.

slipping the form.

eyes blacken.

his back skids across the ground until he hits the wall. His wings slip out, flipping like dead fish. At the sight of blood, her body flares.

Vile craven, the gutter race. You populate the cesspools of this world. livid in the dark, something wild in her gut. He is breathing hard, almost whimpering. She steps over him and runs to the road,

Luca is waiting in that quiet stone place, his imagination, bloated for years, exploding. saturating his world.

The fires are rolling up into the night, their tongues fuming black smoke.

The Inamoh craven, left dying in the dark.

a wounded animal, his wings shuddering.

Vivian moves to the side of the road. Her body is burning. a threat beneath her skin. Crouched at the roots of a tree, she writhes, her bones spiking against each other, her muscles warping; her back arches and fangs shoot down as her jaw crunches, her mouth wide, inhuman. She rips her claws down the tree, her silhouette trembling against the paper moon. All at once her body is struck into violent motion, a familiar feral agitation reclaims her mind, commands her to run. She sprints off, the night bleeding into her fur.



thunder of a second one behind her; she slows, catches his scent. The dark, clean winter smell of Gabriel. Some memory catches in the grind of logic; her mind reels.

human surfaces without warning. She turns to face him. He passes her, swiftly without pausing, the closeness of his body sending electricity through her abdomen. She snarls and races after him.

They run the nine miles in the pitch black, the trees on either side of them an endless corridor of shadow. The moon swells, low in a nest of branches. Vivian’s heart roars. 

























2      Old Ecstasy



For a long time the night quivers in her eyes, she cannot see him. She stares, searching for his body, she can feel him somehow…….His voice is a low purr, and her eyes leap to the source……… Disarming heat, a sadistic animal hunger. A low growl rises in her throat. Baring all her teeth, she tries to lunge up, snarling. There is no disguise for hatred. Unconsciousness blossoms and swallows her up. Dawn fills the forest with cold, dusty light. She is sprinting away from him, threading through the trees.

Last summer, she caught his eye like a thorn. In the early morning, she was a black shape moving swiftly across the tremendous Clovark Bridge, a silhouette against the frozen blue skyline. Gabriel was a warden then, guarding the Anshin River and the Falls, but it was at the end of the war so he was rarely at his post. That morning he had been sent down; a messenger was expected to cross the bridge at dawn with news of the Inamoh’s latest threat. At dawn, numbed by the quiet on the river, he saw her running. And he bolted. Didn’t stop until he reached the foot of the bridge, saw her facing him, still advancing slowly, rising off of four legs and into her human body. She was streaked with mud. Swaying, her head fell forward, her white blonde hair heavy with mud, and he could see her weakening and suddenly she crumpled. He remembered the way she fell, how the strength seemed to flee her body from the toes up, like a cord had been yanked and collapsed all her bones. She landed at the edge of the bridge, her arm hanging in space. That’s when he moved; he jerked forward and reached out to pull her back.

“No,” her voice full of air. 

Such violent collisions can cause astronomical shifts.

Blood soaks through like sun into water.

The bridge crawls up into the dark, over the silvery scales of the sea.

They hit the water and come up choking. Sheets of numbness screeching through their bodies, unspeakable cold. Numbness tightens around her legs and moves up, sealing her torso in an icy capsule.









terrified by the things we could be

and on all sides we’re surrounded by the touch of memory 



Mother spits venom.

Father yells like a wounded animal.

My brother quietly stores hatred.

My sister remembers it.



the wet dark satin jungle

The forest is silver and thick with shadow.



i breathe life and destruction

i am the legends of old, i am raised up in gold





charged with unearthly rage.

drop to the cobblestones, her fingers turning white.

Vivian does not move. Gabriel’s eyes pound in the dark.

The air, ignited with spines of electricity, hums across the skin. Lights are flicking on in windows, a metallic grinding is alerting nerves all over her body. Directly above them something is moving. A strange shadow is spreading.

She recognizes this hallway, now blindingly lit and ringing with that metallic grinding. Office 64, West Landia. Dante.

She cannot keep her eyes open. Wrapped in heavy darkness…
I awake in the quiet of Dante’s Quarien Study. The small round room is completely wooden, with a dome-like ceiling and four long windows facing the ports. Summer shines in the air, the sea ripples green.



Morning. The darkness lifts up like heat. Light spikes through his eyelids and his dream recoils. He yanks the quilt over his head. Hours later, Vivian leans through the doorway. She sits down, cross legged. He slips his arm out from under the quilt, brushes her leg. She pulls the quilt off him. His back rises with his breathing. “Rafe.” She smoothes her hand down from his neck, between his shoulder blades, up again through his hair until he moves. “Up,” she says, gliding out, white morning light striping across her legs. He turns over on his back. After a moment she comes back in, crawling onto the mattress and settling herself beside him. “Onas is out by mid-afternoon. He’s saving some for you.” His hands on her thighs, “okay.” She stands. His hands slide down her calves. “So,” he mumbles, “tonight?” “Tonight for what?” He grips her calves. “You’re always gone. You’re here tonight.” “Yes.” His fingernails trail down to her ankles. “So tonight.” “Come on.” She nudges him with her toe. “He’s waiting.”



I wake up in a stranger’s house. I do not move for a long time.



Incurable Humanness

for what do you hunger?

a single fluid soul.

fierce harmony…an attraction becomes a gravity

that time had gone, evaporated like rain off of flesh



feel everything with unearthly force, decaying slowly at the mercy of drugs and isolation




 eyes bloodshot and bright in the moon



Shook from restraint



torn open like paper mache dolls

“Safehouse the wounded”




To keep the innocent out.



A pack of them is raiding the South.

Where the weaknesses began.

The domain had been split



The silence fostered a feral life

The territory of ashen monsters crawled with men, lured in by whispers of magic. The night bled heat and we waited, perched in trees, our wings rippling, our tongues calling to the animals of the wood. The men paced somewhere close, white and vulnerable. Beside me, Delkian’s lips pulled back in a sneer. The moon weaves spidery light, tangling the forest.



Malice comes like instinct to those suddenly given power.

“Imagine being branded.”

“I can hardly breathe with this love.”

No choice but to run, you choke up and you're done.



Morality splits from tension



Patience, a soiled virtue from fairy tales



You have to carry your own weight. 





We’re the herds of earth and sky, running, running wild



“You brought the night inside you” flashback



Feverish dreams of mid atlantic emptiness

A vast and passive sea

A shipwreck, at long last, rests

Slow moving predators wind through an echo-less deep



I am cut into pieces and trembling…. blood a dark crawling creature



It had all been pushed very far away. All around me, white space ran from my footsteps, when I got close, it lurched back out of reach. I could never return. everything was white and I never reached the ground.



crouched like a hound, stone still like a gargoyle.



“your anger don’t impress me.”





Sihen and Daminet are killing each other off, hunting each other’s bloodlines

Some vulgar lie wedged in among truths, disturbing history.


IMMORTALS

cursed Sihen are now tied to body

                         

MORTALS

Daminet Shifters

Onacha Fae

Nevanar Wiccans

the black fur that ran in strange designs over their heads.

Mothered by the arctic, the deep sea cold.

nomads of the tundra, peddlers of the sinned,

animals with hides of frost, stark souls ripped by wind,

sworn enemies of the king, they are rooted to the street

swarming into slaughterhouses like beetles in the heat

Sivdu Elementals

Hunters of Anlaria....shell white, his eyes broke the night of his face.

Aio Alcen....The winged guardians

The Inamoh Craven



PLACES

Imthake Eastern Shore

E’ Felca Western Shore

Matherin Wood

Naioix Mountains

Dunjah Plains

Countries in the Dust

Lomixen Sea

Sengase Craters