A dark, fantastical tale that is intended to unfold a paragraph, or thereabouts, at a time.
17 May 2023 1 minute read 1 comment Jay Lonnquist $0.05
For a thousand years, the Opal Quarter has spread and sprawled like a hungry, fungal organ from out the ventricle of the great City’s heart. There are walls within walls, within tangles of odd architecture. Common masonry in the embrasure of uncanny...
7 Mar 2022 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.01
Not altogether far now from the disciple’s encroaching approach, the martinets of the Burning Houses had begun their march, hours before the sun sank into its early winter cradle. They moved in modest groups of three or four with steady, ample warine...
3 Mar 2022 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.05
Fleet as feathers in a squall. Through the night’s middle-dark the disciple flees her careless handiwork, deeper into the Opal Quarter’s warren of wending ways and lanes. Pausing after mere heartbeats in the narrow cleft of a rotten wall, breath bill...
1 Mar 2022 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.03
Elsewhere and otherwhiles… The Above where Autumn now curls into Winter, like a leaf blown and beset by frostburn. The disciple, swaddled in voluminous ink-black work-robes of a common scoundrel of the Lower Houses. Buoyed by the haemal gift from her...
18 Jul 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.03
And upon the Marquis’ pronouncement, the audience came to an unequivocal close. Pettiwren had swiftly ushered the pair out. Soon afterwards, Umin found himself quartered in a modest servant’s cell amongst the Marquis’ and Marquess’ personal retinue....
14 May 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.02
Furtively studying the reclining pair of recondite monarchs, Umin is disquietingly reminded of Otts’ great dramatic tragedy, the Under Sublime. Of the mercurial goddess Sho and her unceasingly rapacious husband Shiil, engaged in amicable philosophic...
26 Apr 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.02
Pettiwren leads them along until the tumultuous tide of the Court recedes at last to something above a dull whisper. They cross pungent galleries of atrous wood-panel and silver-leaf, interrupted by bare pillars of onyx, snaking and sensuous, smooth...
23 Apr 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.03
The sentries take up a waiting stance at their appearance, with the guarded ease of blooded soldiers. Short knives and slim, ragged-bladed spears at rest. Pyna drifts forward and utters a word unheard by Umin, prompting the nearer sentry to produce a...
21 Apr 2021 2 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.06
The gate soon shut once more against the crypt of the Paper God and its unresting dead. Then up, up along a relentlessly steep stair redolent with chalk and the sour sweetness of unknowable antiquity. For the first long while of their ascent, the sta...
19 Apr 2021 1 minute read 0 comments Jay Lonnquist $0.01
Come Come Where other Unspeakables walk, Here There We will to The Stair. Umin rises painfully from the powdery dunes of violently disheveled particulate, and draws in a few gasping breaths through the covering thickness of his scarf. The air is pon...
