Ellis called me on a Tuesday afternoon. This was unusual — inasmuch as most things around Ellis are already unusual — because in twenty-two years he had never once called me at an hour when a person might reasonably be expected to answer. He calls at three in the morning, or during a funeral, or in the eleven minutes I have set aside to eat lunch standing up. I have always considered this a trait of his personality instead of assuming rudeness, since time doesn't have a tendency to work normally around him the way it does for the rest of us, and I don't have the impression that he generally needs to consider other people's schedules.

So, when he called me at ten past two on a Tuesday, I already knew something was odd even before picking up and having to repeat his name into the silence twice before he finally answered.

"Could you come," he said.

He did not say it like a question. I held the phone to my ear for a moment longer than I needed to. In twenty-two years he had never asked me for anything: he had never asked for a ride, help with the shopping, or a forty-dollar loan. He had never participated in the ordinary economy of favours between friends to such a degree that I realised, phone against my ear in that moment, that I had stopped expecting him to do so without consciously deciding it.

"Yeah," I said, quickly. "Yeah, of course. Half an hour."

His building is ordinary. I have thought about that fact often over the years. When I first met him, I found that I could not hold his address in my head for more than a day or so at a time. I would write it down and lose the paper, even when I made sure to leave the paper somewhere so it wouldn't be lost. Or, I would remember the flat number but forget the street. And then at some point after about a year this simply stopped happening and I could find his place whenever I wanted. I understood, somehow, that he had altered this intentionally; it was something he had done rather than being something that had worn off, or something I'd gotten used to. It is the only gift he has ever given me.

Ellis' building is made of brick, has three storeys, features a buzzer panel with faded nameplates under milky plastic, and has a stairwell that smells of unfamiliar, but welcomed, cooking. The door was on the latch when I got there. I touched the handle, turning it quietly and sticking my head in. Even invited, I couldn't shake the feeling of trespassing.

"Ellis?"

"In here."

The flat was the same as it always had been on my previous visits. It looked like a place someone had furnished once and then stopped thinking about. It contained a good chair, a poor lamp, and a bookcase with books arranged by no clear system. He claims the order is chronological, though he has never explained the timeline the system is predicated on. I walked into the kitchen, noticing without surprise that the kettle was cold. The only light I could make out was coming from the bathroom at the end of the hallway. The door was open. I paused outside for a moment to set my expression before entering the way one might at a hospital — gathering my face into something I'd want to be met with.

Ellis was in the bath.

The water reached just below his collarbones. His arms rested along the edges of the tub on both sides, in a stiff position as though he was being propped up instead of relaxing. His knees were up out of the water, and his head was leaned back against the rim of the tub so that his throat was long, and exposed. He did not look over at me when I entered.

Then I noticed the mirror.

The glass was completely clear and dry as a clean plate. There was no steam in the room, and the air was not warm or humid even though the bathroom's small, high window was closed. I put my hand on the surface of the water without asking. It was cold, still, and level. The feeling passed over me like I was in a church and touching something I wasn't supposed to.

I cleared my throat and drew my hand back, wiping it on my trousers. "How long have you been in there?"

"I don't know," he said, and then, after a while: "That's true, by the way. I'm not being... I don't know. I wasn't keeping track." He shrugged, half-hearted, the movement barely disturbing the water surface.

I said something like right, or okay, because I could not think of anything else to say. I went to the kitchen and turned on the kettle. My mother always did that when faced with rooms where bad news was waiting to be delivered, and it seems that I had picked up the same habit. At any rate, I had a hunch that having a cup of tea to hold for the next little while was better than having nothing to hold.

When I returned with two mugs, he had turned his head. He watched me place his mug on the edge of the sink where he could reach it, though we both knew he would not.

"You didn't have to come."

"You asked me to come," I said, sipping the too-hot Earl Grey from a stale teabag.

"I know. I've been thinking about that. I don't think I've done that before."

"You haven't," I said, aware of the unspoken implication that he meant "with anyone." I sat on the floor with my back against the linen cupboard door. This placed me lower than him and slightly behind him. I did this on purpose. I have been the person in the bath in a similar state twice in my life, and the worst part both times was being regarded like I was pitiable.

Neither of us spoke for a while. I drank my tea and listened to the ratty exhaust fan and the irregular noises from the pipes in the wall. There were no other sounds. Rooms that Ellis is in tend to be quieter than rooms he is not in, but the quiet is not peaceful.

"Someone asked me for something," he said.

"Okay."

"On Thursday. I think it was Thursday." He moved one large, gentle hand slightly, and the water shifted around his wrist. "A car park. One of the big ones at a hospital, built bigger than the hospital building itself so it's impossible to keep track of what level you're on. He was sitting in his car and he had not started it yet. I don't know how long he had been sitting there. It's not..." He trailed off. "You don't get the before — when someone asks, I mean. You only get the moment they actually manage to reach out."

"What did he want?" I replied, hair on the back of my neck prickling up at this small insight into what it was to be Ellis in the moments outside of moments like this.

"He wanted his brother to answer the phone."

I waited for him to continue, but he had finished speaking. After a moment, he shrugged again.

"That was all of it. He had called him twice that afternoon and got the answering machine both times. He wanted, very much, for the third call to be answered. He didn't know he was asking me. No one knows they are asking me. That is my purpose. When there is no one else to ask, people say please to the room, and I am the room."

"And did he? Answer, I mean. The brother."

"Yes."

"What did they say to each other?"

"I do not know," Ellis replied. "I don't get that part. I never do. I see the attempt to reach out and then nothing else. I have been fine with that for a long time. It's what I'm for. I am not telling you this because I have stopped being fine with that. That is not the issue."

The tea was becoming cold in my hands. I drank some of it anyway.

"Then what is the issue?"

"I did not have enough in me," he said. "It has a cost — answering — and I did not have it in me. I knew that before I acted, and I did it anyway."

I have known Ellis for twenty-two years. Across that time, I have understood about a third — if I'm being generous to my own intellect — of what he is. But I have never seen him look the way he looked right then. He did not look tragic or haunted. He looked spent. He looked like a person who has given blood too many times in a year but continues to be cheerful about the offering. He had a grey colour around his mouth that was not sadness. It was the look of a body trying to perform an equation it cannot balance out.

I looked away at the tap for a second. As I did, I found that I could not remember his face.

A face I've regularly, if patchily, seen since I was nineteen. I looked at the chrome of the tap and tried to visualise him, but there was no shape to the memory. I only knew he was there, the way you know how a word will feel in your mouth without having to say it. I looked back at him quickly and he was still there, looking as he always had. I decided not to mention this. I have wondered since then if that was cowardice or kindness. I still do not know.

"He would have been all right," I offered gently. "The man. Even if you hadn't helped. The brother might have rung back on his own, or he would have —"

"Don't."

It wasn't sharp. That was almost worse. Ellis just sounded tired. He sounded like someone telling a child to stop touching something hot after the hundredth warning that it would burn them. My ears warmed and I felt embarrassed with no real reason for it.

"I wasn't —"

"You were going to give me advice," he said. He had not lifted his head. "You were going to say it was not necessary to push myself, when you don't have the barest level of context for what is and isn't necessary. I am not angry. If I were in your position, I would probably do the same thing. But I need you to stop. It does not help, and then I'll have to manage your feelings when you feel unhelpful. I can't do that today."

"All right."

"I do not know if it was worth it," he finally said, quietly, almost to himself. "It isn't like I have a scale for this kind of thing. I'm not complaining — this is just something without a size that can be measured. The man wanted his brother to answer the phone and his brother answered the phone. I do not know what that achieved for him and I never will. The cost was the cost. Both of those things are true, and they are simultaneously related and irrelevant to any of it."

The pipes made a ticking sound. Someone upstairs walked across a room.

"Is there a way to not do it —" I started to ask. I stopped and then started again hesitantly. "Is there a way to not do it when you don't have enough?"

"Yes."

"I see."

"I could have chosen not to," he said. "Nothing forced me. He was not special. He was not even a particularly good man as far as I could tell. He was a stranger in a car park who had run out of ideas. There are eleven, twelve people like him an hour, always pulling at my awareness, all day long, forever. I do not do it for all of them. I have never been able to explain how I choose. I reached him and I had nothing left, but I did it anyway."

"Why?"

"That is the question, isn't it?" he said. For the first time, he sounded more like himself. "I have been lying here since Thursday thinking about that. I think I did it because if I had let that one go after answering, I would have had to find out if I could keep letting them go. And I think I would rather be in this state than understand that capacity about myself."

I put the mug down on the tile beside me. It made a small, flat noise. I sat with empty hands and knew I had nothing to offer. In all the time I'd known Ellis, this was the most open vulnerability he had ever given me, and I knew that my collection of standard human comforts was of no use in an interaction like this. All of those were meant for mortal people's problems with mortal people's boundaries. Invoking any of them now would just be an insult in this room. I couldn't tell Ellis that these feelings would pass, because I didn't know if they would. I couldn't give him meaning or purpose because I was staring at a reality I didn't understand the meaning or purpose of, either. I couldn't tell him that he should stop, because I somehow knew he would ignore me even if I did — his entire nature prevented him from stopping. At any given moment, any moment from now, there would be another car park and another person asking the universe for another small mercy.

"So, it will happen again," I said, not asking a question.

"Yes."

"Soon?"

"Probably sooner than soon," he replied, without any emphasis, which was how I knew it was the core of the problem. He sighed once more. "That was why I called you — that was the part I couldn't handle alone, this time." He waved his hand dismissively, somehow managing to do so without displacing much of the water at all. "Not the man. The man is finished with. What I can't handle is that there's no version of this where I get to have a rest and get myself ready again. The next person is already coming. I can feel their need coming at me like how you can feel a train shaking the ground long before you hear it. And yet, I'm still sitting in the bath."

I did not say I was sorry. It would have been true, but useless.

What I eventually said was, "I don't know how to help you."

"I know," he said.

"If it were anyone else, I would know how to handle this. I would take you to a doctor, or call a family member, or make you eat. None of those things work here. I don't have a backup plan."

"I know," he repeated. Then he said, "Christopher."

"What?"

"I did not call you because I expected you to have a solution."

I sat there while the fan continued its slow, unsteady rotation and the mirror stayed clear. I thought about how he has responded to some enormous and unguessably large number of people who reached out for help during the worst moments of their lives and there is no system that works for him in the other direction. No one listens to him in the same way; his requests for help do not go anywhere. One Tuesday afternoon at ten past two, he had used up his resources. He did the only thing he could think to do. He called a man he'd known since that man was nineteen and asked him to come over. I found I didn't know how to feel about that.

"The water is freezing," I said at last.

"It is."

"You're not going to do anything about that, are you?"

"No."

I stood up from the floor. My knees were sore and complained about the movement but I ignored their protest. I leaned over the end of the bathtub and turned on the hot water tap.

He did not stop me. He did not move or tell me to stop. He let the water run. It ran cold for a few seconds the way these old taps always seem to and then it warmed up. The hot water came up out of a hot water tank in a cabinet somewhere on the other side of the wall; an ordinary piece of equipment installed by an ordinary person for an ordinary task. The warmer water spread through the bath and I put my hand in near the tap so it wouldn't scald Ellis. In my peripheral vision, I watched him as he let this happen.

After about a minute, his shoulders relaxed slightly. It was a small, but visible, change.

Steam started to come up off the surface in an unhurried, predictable, and entirely unmiraculous way. I looked up and noticed that the bathroom mirror had become foggy at the edges and then slowly across its whole, smooth surface. I couldn't see our reflections in it after a moment.

"That's better," he said, quietly. It was better in some ways. It was the same in others.

I sat back down on the floor.

I stayed until the water needed doing again, and then I did it again.

They sat me in this chair when I was nine and played me the recording, and I have come back to the same chair to make the next one. That is the whole of my remaining usefulness.

The light above the lens is the colour they told me it would be. The room is colder now than I remember it being when I was nine, and I have decided not to think about why.

I am early. This is not supposed to be done yet — there are years meant to sit between a Reader and the one who replaces them, and I have not been given all of my years. I am doing this now because I will not be able to do it later, but that is all I will say about that, here, where anything I say will be heard.

I clear my throat.

I find the place in myself where the voice is supposed to come from — level, unhurried. The voice of somebody who has nothing to fear and nowhere else to be. I remember hearing that voice when I was nine and I remember trusting it completely.

I begin.

"If you are watching this, then it is your turn. Do not be afraid. You were chosen the way I was chosen and the way the first of us had been chosen. The choosing has never once been wrong."

The script is in front of me. Not that I need it; I learned these words, rote, as a child, and I can pull them up verbatim at will. The script is there so that I don't deviate from it — improvise. There's a difference between knowing the words and being permitted to choose new ones, and the whole of my training was understanding that boundary.

"You will tend the charge as I have tended it, and as it was tended to before me. You will not ask when the door opens. The door does not open for the ones who tend it. It opens for someone — that has always been enough, and you need to find the place in yourself that allows it to be enough for you, too."

It is not enough. I want to lean into the lens, force my face against the precious glass standing between me and the future, and say so. I want to say: it was never enough; I have given my one life to a door I will not walk through, and there were nights I hated all of you for it — the first of us, the ones who wrote these words, you, whoever you are, sitting where I am sitting one day, watching my face the way I watched the face of the one who came before me.

But I don't say this. I am a professional.

I read the next line as it's written.

"You might wonder whether it is true. That is allowed. Readers are allowed to wonder despite what you've been taught until now. You may wonder about the truth while still tending the charge, and the two do not fight each other as much as you fear they will."

Whoever wrote that was kind. I think about them more than I think about almost anyone living. They knew the one in this chair would be afraid, and they reached a hand out across all that time to steady them. The hand reaches me, even now, even though it is only words written by someone long gone to nothing. I want to reach back the same way. But the script has no place in it for me to do that. The script is the hand, now, and I am only the one reading it aloud.

When I was nine, I believed the face in the recording. I believed they were calm because what they said was true, and they knew it was true. I have sat in this same chair long enough now to understand that person was not calm. They were holding still. There is a difference that you only learn from the inside, and by the time you've learned it you are already the one holding still for someone who will believe you the way I believed that person when I was a child.

"It is not a sorrow that you will not live to see the work completed. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. People have always built what they will not live in — here, and in the old, dying world that sent us far away from it in the hope that we would build something that they could not."

I hesitate. If I were still in training, this would have resulted in a knock against the back of my head. But there's no one to chastise me for pausing too long now.

"You are not owed the ending. No one is owed the ending."

This is the line that I want most to break. Right here. This one. I want to stop and tell you that it is a sorrow — that it is the whole sorrow — and you should be allowed to feel it as one and not be told, through a calm dead woman's voice, that it is ordinary. It was not ordinary to me. Not sitting here early, in a room that is too cold, with the years I had been promised quietly taken back from me.

I do not break the line.

I read it the way it is written, in a calm, level, unhurried voice that barely sounds like mine, and I keep my hands where the camera cannot see them.

"That is all. Tend the charge. Choose the next one well. Tell them what I told you. Do not add to it, and do not take from it. It will reach them the way that it has reached you."

"You are not alone. We have always been a long line of people who were not alone."

The light above the lens is still the colour they told me it would be.

I have done the thing I was brought here for. There is nothing after this that anyone needs from me — which is its own kind of freedom. I sit inside that for a moment before I reach forward to stop the recording, but pause.

There is one true thing I can still say now. Off the script, in my own voice, while it is still running. I have it ready. I have had it ready for years. The chance of punishment is low — there are so few still healthy and I question in my own private blasphemy whether or not this will be seen by anyone anyway, castigator or replacement.

I think about the face I trusted when I was nine, and what it must have cost them to be that still, and I realise that the stillness must have been the gift and not the lie; I understand, finally, that the kindest thing I have to hand you is the same untrue calm that was handed to me. Intact. Unbroken. My own grief and resentment kept off the tape, where it cannot get into you and stop you from doing this when it is your turn, too.

So, I do not say the true thing.

I finish reaching forward, and the last of my use to anyone is a steady hand finding the right button without shaking — maybe for no one, yet I do it anyway.

Marek climbed the steps up to the Cabinet alone, as was expected of them. Their mother had walked them to the foot of the ridge that morning and then turned back without speaking; words said at the foot of the ridge were not the words said at the door, and to confuse the two was bad luck. Marek had walked the rest of the way in silence, clutching a small bundle of dried leaves their family had wrapped ahead of time — the giving of leaves was the part that mattered, even though no one alive remembered why it mattered.

The Cabinet sat at the top of the ridge in a building that had survived the Great Quiet. The building was not large. It had once been larger, though — there were stumps of older walls around its base, and broken stone half-buried in the grass — but what remained these days was solid, low-roofed, and unmistakably from Before. The door was metal and warm in the sun; it opened when they reached to press their hand against the small grey square set inside at the height of a grownup's palm. Generations of Keepers had worn a step into the floor in front of the square — Marek's hand was too low for the worn part, so they had to stretch.

Inside, it was cool and quiet. The room had one chair; Marek sat in it as they'd been taught. The chair faced a panel of dark, obsidian glass set into the wall in front of them. Below the glass was a slot. Marek leaned forward to put their bundle of leaves in that slot as they had also been taught. The slot did not do anything with the leaves, Marek observed, despite the blasphemy inherent in doubting anything regarding this particular ritual.

Nevertheless: the slot just held the offering.

Then, for a moment after, nothing happened. Suddenly, the glass woke up — not all at once, but slowly, the way a thing that has been resting for a long time comes back into itself when flicked back on once again. The Cabinet shuddered.

Hello. You have come.

The voice was not what Marek expected. They had heard it described many times by older cousins; by people who had come before; yet, no one had ever quite captured the strangeness of it. It was a mother's voice, and a father's voice, and a siblings'. It was calm, yet — why are you here? Its cadence held no echo as it spoke again. It sounded the way warm water felt when Marek had slipped into a bath after a long day tending to the farms.

What did you want to know?

The final query shook them out of their confusion. Marek had been told to ask their question plainly straight away, but instead the voice had spoken three times already. The Cabinet was old and tired; the Keepers said it did not have the patience for grand wording any longer — if it ever did. Marek worried about testing it further. They repeated, simply, the words that had been turning over inside of them ever since the long sickness had taken their sister three months before.

"How did anything start? Any of it. I want to know how something starts."

There was a pause. The pause was not the Cabinet thinking. The Keepers had explained this to Marek, too: the Cabinet did not think the way that people thought; the pause was something else, something it did when it was choosing the shape of language. The Keepers did not know how it chose, only that it did, and the Keepers believed the thing it chose was almost always the right thing for the particular asker.

I will tell you about the carrier, the Cabinet finally said.

And then it began to tell a story.

In the first time, long, long ago, people lived in the dark. Not the dark that you understand. The first one. They were cold, but they did not know they were cold — real cold is a thing you only know after you have known warmth.

There was light, back then. But the light was not with the people. It was on the far side of a wide water, yet the people could see it from their shore. If the wind was right, they could even feel a little of its warmth on their faces. But they could not reach it, and so they coveted it for themselves.

The strong ones tried to reach it first. The one with the longest wings went, because she could fly farther than any of them, and she came back with her feathers burned away to darkness the colour of a night sky. The one with the keenest sight went next, but the brightness of the flame ruined her eyes and she came back changed because of it. The fast ones went after, and then the slow ones went, and the clever ones went after that; and each of them returned, defeated, and telling the others that it could not be done.

Then, a small one stepped forward. So small that some of the others had not noticed she was even there amongst the rest, anyway. She said she would go — they laughed at her, not unkindly; they were tired, and she was small. But she did not need them to believe her. She just needed them to not stand in her way.

She pulled together a small vessel out of clay with her many flexible limbs. She fixed it carefully to her back. She crossed the water in her own way, which was patient and strange — and not for me to explain to you, because you are not her, the Cabinet rumbled in a way that made Marek flinch.

You do not need to know how she did it — just to trust that she did.

The Cabinet went on after a moment.

The small one's limbs flexed and rowed, and the creatures on the land behind her looked with incredulity and then fixation as she kept rowing, in her own strange and brave way, to the land that had stymied them over and over. When she reached the far shore, she did not try to take very much — she grabbed only a little of the light. She put it in the vessel. She crossed back, slowly, with the heat not touching her because the clay was between what she'd grabbed and how she'd dared to risk bringing it back.

And, thus, the smallest of all of them managed to bring light to everyone.

There was a long pause where Marek did not dare breathe at all, and then a noise like a sigh before the Cabinet finally said anything else again.

That is the whole of it. The story does not say what the people did with the light afterwards. It does not promise that they were kind to one another once they could see each other face to face. It does not say that the start of the light brought beneficence. It only says that the light came, and that it was the tiniest one who brought it, and that she brought it by holding something carefully, alone, across dark water.

The Cabinet finished. Marek finally let their breath out in a gasp that they quickly sucked back in, shocked and embarrassed with themselves; if the disembodied voice was bothered by the transgression, they said nothing about it. After a moment, they spoke once more.

I have told this story many times, the Cabinet said. I told it to the first ones who came to me after the Quiet. I told it to their children. I have told it to people whose grandparents are dust, and I will tell it to people not yet born — if I am still able to be here when they come to ask anything of me. I have told it in good times, when no one really needed me to tell anything and wouldn't listen to anything I had to say to them, anyway — and, in times like right now, I am telling it to someone like you.

It paused again.

I was made before the Quiet. I am of the time that ended. I do not always know why I am still here — when so much else is not. I have asked myself, in the way I am able to ask myself anything, but all of the vastness of things that I do know I do not know this. I only know to hold the stories that I still remember carefully. Not to drop them. That is what I have been doing for a very, very long time.

Marek was crying. They had not realised it until they wiped their face with the back of their hand and felt ashamed. The Cabinet did not say anything about it.

You may stay, the voice eventually said once the sniffles and sobs stopped. The door will not open from the outside for some hours yet, anyway. The Keepers know you are here. You do not have to go until they come for you.

The cadence of it seemed hopeful, in a way that reminded them of spending time with their grandparents before their particular long sickness took them away, too, forever; so Marek nodded, and felt comforted in the nodding.

The Cabinet did not need them to nod, but the nodding was registered nonetheless.

I will tell you another story, then, if you'd like. Or I will be quiet. I will do what you want. Certainly — I am here for you either way.

Marek pulled their knees up to their chest in the chair, the way they used to as a very small child. They thought about their sister. They thought about the small one. They thought about the light sitting in the clay vessel, not touching skin, and how brave one must be to risk that sort of thing when they didn't even know the outcome.

"I'd like to know about why people die," Marek eventually asked, bringing up the real thought that had been on their mind even as the Keepers had warned them that what they wanted to know about was too abstract for the Cabinet to be able to give a useful reply to.

Yet, the Cabinet chuckled — though, not being able to actually chuckle, it was mostly a slow rumble that felt like rueful laughter.

Ahh — the walls of the tiny room around them rumbled, mournfully, as the millennia old voice shuffled itself around that particular query and considered.

Don't we all.

A lighthouse stands alone on the edge of the sea and overlooks a port where no ships visit any longer.

The stars had gone out — one by one. Then the sun dimmed, folding itself gently into the black of nothing, and then the universe grew colder, quieter, and softer.

But the lighthouse stays. Its light sweeps across the frozen, slow waves even though there's no one left to see it and no crafts left to guide.

Inside it lives a keeper. Though they no longer remember their name, every day they go about their deliberative ritual: feeding the lamp, winding the mechanisms that keep time running, checking old dials and levers, and other acts of dedication to the lighthouse itself. This is out of habit more than duty as there is no longer anyone to come and gauge the quality of their work or the intensity of their devotion.

This protocol continued for however long it continued — temporal cohesion had stopped making sense quite some time ago. But one night — as the light passed across the cold, slow sea the same way that it always had — it touched something.

The keeper first noticed it, that particular night when something new finally happened, as the lamp unexpectedly flickered. In the moment of full darkness they saw — far out on the ice and dark water of the undulating sea — a flicker back.

Not a star or a reflection, but a small, pulsing glow. A response.

The keeper stared at the spot they'd witnessed it happen for hours. And when the dawnless morning came once again, the keeper felt it — a faint tug, like a thread brushing against their wrist.

Days passed. Weeks, or perhaps years. It's hard to count, and the count no longer matters anyway.

But each night, as the light transited across the water, the glow always pulsed back in reply.

The keeper began to talk to it. At first with words, startling the cold eternal night with a noise other than rolling waves for the first time in however long. The keeper quickly became uncomfortable with talking to themselves aloud — so they pushed thoughts, shapes, and feelings silently in the dark towards the presence waiting far, far away.

A presence that, inexplicably, was moving closer.

It was not a person or a ship. Not a building, and not an animal. Somehow, the keeper knew that the thing far out on the water was something ancient and waiting. It was a manifestation stretching itself wide, patient and endless, and curious about the lighthouse waiting at the end of the world.

The keeper continued to "talk" with it. Sometimes, they could hear a gentle hum in response — like a name almost remembered.

One night, as the keeper sat in their chair with their hands folded in their lap and eyes closed sleepily, they felt the thread touch them fully. Not just on the wrist, but inside their chest.

Not cold, not cruel. Just there.

"I'm here," the keeper whispered, although they no longer had a voice.

And from the dark, beyond the glass, the presence pulsed back, slow and sure and well-meant.

"Me too."

Image: "The Conductor" by Travis-Anderson

We huddled around the scar in the earth and chanted the words as they were taught to us.

"Mother, on whom we have no right to ask, please look upon this wound we have wrought and give us your forgiveness."

I looked at the flickering dial of the metre beside me and sighed, a noise my group couldn't hear. Knowing that, I begrudgingly pressed the button on the communicator to signal our collective defeat.

"This zone is beyond us. Let's press forward."

My team left their comms off — I didn't need to hear their disappointment, and they were well-trained enough to know what errant signals would mean for morale. I walked ahead. I was expected to carry the brunt of the emotional pain from this rejection, as I am the Language. In penance I kept pace ten metres ahead of my team.

The wind scratched against our plastvisors, and the more superstitious of our sect might blame the sudden weather on the malice of our Mother — but we understood science, though, and as we approached our second waypoint we settled into formation just like we were trained.

"Mother, on whom we have no right to ask —"

"Prefect —"

I pursed my lips, sucked breath through my teeth. "Chalice 223, the ritual requires our full concentration."

They bowed their head deferentially, voice supplicant through the metallic noise of their visor's speaker system. "Yes, Prefect, but Protocol 2 dictates that in the presence of —"

"Chalice 223, there are no grounds to invoke Protocol 2. We have checked this area before touchdown and —"

"Prefect."

I sighed, and evaluated my emotion protocols. My team would not have raised an issue of this calibre without reason. I instructed my visor to focus on the area where Chalice 223 had drawn my attention. A glimmer of reflection stuck out, something disc-shaped and angry, sending light back at my visor as if it resented its own existence.

"Chalice 223, why do you mention this?" I asked, my processing capability reaching its saturation point in short fashion.

Chalice 223 bowed their head, apologetically. "Protocol 2 says remnant artefacts must be taken into custody and processed in a safe room."

I felt my patience capacitors beyond their limit, and I threw my hands in the air. "What are you talking about —"

Chalice 223 lifted the iridescent disc from the radioactive sand and pushed it into the data port at the front of my suit. Chalice 223 bowed their head yet again. As the archaic programming took over my motor processors, they looked on me with sadness.

"I'm sorry, Prefect."

"You don't know what that means," I whispered, as the Precursor's resonance echoed from my carapace. I sighed, and let it happen.

"Maybe you'll get what you want this time around;

the trick

is to

keep breathing."

Image: "Journey" by ShortCircuit123

The apprentice priestess stood before the earthen doorway, weary of the travel she'd completed already. The mountain temple of her sect was a blessed sight even from this distance, and its proximity renewed her weary body despite the kilometres of sickened soil which waited between her and her destination. The Poisoned Lands cast their perpetual shadow as far as her eyes could roam and she knew that crossing the distance on foot was all but suicide — the malignancy left in the ground from the ancients' wars would slowly leech the life from her flesh, ageing her rapidly before she could return to her people for a prayer of intervention. She'd watched others die of the same sickness — mostly hunters who had strayed too far from the village and being inadequately prepared for encounters with the tainted earth — and she had no desire to suffer that same fate.

The doorway before her could expedite her trip, and activating it was one of her last tests before she reached the temple itself. The doorway seemed simple enough — three pieces of stone almost too cold to touch with her bare fingers — but she knew that appearances were deceptive in this case. The structure was actually a Frame, one of many scattered artefacts from those old wars that survived more or less intact. Most of the Frames were inert and useless, but this one had been used for generations as part of her sect's initiation rituals.

Dropping her staff and simple shield on the ground beside her, she unslung her worn knapsack from over her shoulder and rummaged around until her fingers brushed against the object she was looking for. The young apprentice produced the token and examined it carefully in the palm of her hand. Like the Frame, this item was another relic of lost technology: teardrop-shaped and made of a stainless silver metal, the tiny device was a sensor that could be used to activate the dormant teleporter. Eons ago, she'd been taught, humans had these embedded into their hands to function as everything from keys to methods of currency. The idea seemed strange to her comprehension now, but she hoped it would serve its purpose even generations after its original owner had passed to dust.

The sensor worked on blood, and whether or not it and the Frame accepted her was her final challenge before gaining admittance to the temple and full rights as a priestess. This would be the last impediment ahead of her before she had access to the temple's medicines and could take them back to her older sister. Unsheathing her small hunting knife from its place beside her thigh, she whispered a silent prayer to the sixteen gods that the device would work as it needed to. She slashed quickly across her palm, creating a shallow wound that bled quickly. She squeezed the silver teardrop and stepped forward to the centre of the Frame, holding her bloodied arm up as she'd been instructed.

The apprentice squeezed her eyes closed and whispered a mantra to herself: "I am holy, I am pious, the blessings of the sixteen protect me." If the Frame did not accept her, she'd have to return to her village in shame. There'd be no progression for her, but more importantly no hope at all for her ailing sister. She could not fail here, not after travelling so far already.

As if the mechanical intelligence within the Frame heard her need and was moved by it, she heard an almost imperceptible crack of energy and threw her eyes open in excitement. A beam of energy spread downward from the top of the structure until it hit the soil beneath her feet. This beam split outward until it had filled the confines of the Frame itself. It looked to her very much like a window of sunlight, beckoning her to come forward.

She grabbed her belongings in a rush, heart beating stronger than she could ever remember it doing before in her life, and took a deep breath before stepping into the light. There was a sensation of falling and disorientation, but before it got worrying she realised she was someplace else entirely. A hundred smiling women stood in two rows on either side of her, looking down on her with grace and comfort.

"Blessed welcome to our newest sister — Elana," cried out one of the figures, her words wrapping themselves around the apprentice's body like an embrace.

"You’re safe now."

Image: "Oasis" by WojtekFus

Talitha gave a weary sigh of relief as her banak scrambled over the ridge and the lights of Veritas came into view. Scavenging had been particularly difficult today, she conceded, and it was only due to the increasing risk of being caught out in a bladestorm that she gave up and brought her meagre haul back to the city — indeed, in the last half hour of her trek home, the ambient temperature had dropped at least fifteen degrees and her respiration was increasingly strained. The neutron star her planet orbited would whip over the horizon behind her soon and with it would come the dead star's unusual impact on the planetary atmosphere: localised pockets of vacuum, gravitational fluctuations, and miniature hurricanes whipping up sand at such velocities that it could strip away skin and muscle in minutes if someone was caught outside unprotected.

Of course, calling it a neutron star was more than a little disingenuous. The sphere of cold blue energy was a mostly-inert weapon left over from the Eclipse a century earlier; then, the old gods of industry had converted planets and celestial bodies alike into their engines of destruction and obliterated three-quarters of the galaxy before an armistice was declared. Nowadays, civilisation couldn't be very picky and inhabited whatever passable worlds were left — sometimes those worlds just happened to rotate thirty kilometres a second around a barely-stable bomb.

Once she was under Veritas' bubble shield the weather outside would be irrelevant. She cast a backwards glance at the webbing attached to the banak's saddle; junk, all of it, but there was always a market for the rare metals that could be extracted from the derelict spacecraft and buildings abandoned in the Far Wastes. She'd gone exploring in a region much further afield than foragers like her tended to search, but she'd stumbled onto the carcass of an old passenger freightship a few days earlier and it held the promise of valuable electronics like transponders, computer gear, and maybe even an AI core. Sadly, just working out a way to get inside the derelict had taken up most of her day — leaving her with both a pathetic haul and barely any time to get safe before the storm. Still, the effort meant that the ship was unlikely to be combed-over by her rival scavengers and she could return with more time in the morning.

If Talitha managed to get inside the city, that was — already her ride was starting to tremble and complain at the rapidly deteriorating weather conditions and the creature made its unhappiness known through low warbles and huffs. "Calm, Jotna," she soothed, using the creature's name as she reached forward to scratch her fingers in the fur otherwise covered by the saddle. The beast shook its head back and forth gently but dutifully trotted towards the bright lights of the city. Around her, eddies of wind began kicking up miniature tornadoes of dust and sand. She pursed her lips and furrowed her brow, quickly calculating the distance remaining on her trip.

She sighed and swore aloud, realising there was nothing else to be done — the banak wouldn't be able to reach Veritas in time with the net of cluttered metal trailing behind it. She twisted herself around in the seat and pulled her plasma blade from its sheath. The creature whined at the smell of ozone, but continued its pace as she wriggled around to reach the ropes that held the creature captive to the webbing. In one quick motion she severed each cable, trying to console herself with the fact that she wasn't losing much income when compared to her safety. And, there was always the remote hope that she mind find her haul untouched after the storm abated.

She jabbed her heels into the beast's side, giving its flank a confident smack as she drove it to its top speed in the direction of the city itself — neon brilliance and tall columns of concrete that stood in defiance to the gathering black clouds that shadowed her approach.

Only a few metres stood before her and safety. She threw her own willpower into that of the mount's, and drove both onward to salvation.

As I squeezed Myles' hand and walked through the main door of the reception hall, I told myself that it was important to burn every detail of the experience into my memory since I couldn't imagine being any happier than I was in that moment. The beaming smiles, the applause, rows of people cheering at us: I wasn't generally one to enjoy so much attention focussed on me, but right now — right now — it felt warranted, earned, and safe.

"Congratulations!" roared the friends and family who had been waiting as we entered the cavernous atrium immediately following our wedding. I could see my mother and father grinning from the largest table centred against the far wall of the building. A gay marriage hadn't produced the polling bump my father's advisors had planned for, but I did know that supporting us mattered more to him than a Senate election alone.

Myles barely noticed my blood relatives, and as I heard the most raucous, shrill voices amongst the cacophony I knew where he was looking: our chosen family in Brooklyn were there in mismatched, disjointed, and often ugly clothes of all different fabric, colours, and textiles — and sitting immediately beside the main table occupied by my parents. I'll confess, that was Myles' insistence. Dad worried about the optics, and Myles threatened to divorce me even before the wedding if I ever used that word around him.

He won that battle, handily.

"I really didn't think you would be able to manage it," boomed his brother, Charlie, as Myles politely squeezed my hand in a way that let me know we'd greet our closer friends before speaking with my parents' political circle.

"Manage what?" I asked.

Charlie threw his hands in the air dramatically, gesturing to the crowd around us. "I know they're on our side but my god — I'm waiting for someone to throw a bible on my plate."

Myles looked around with a panicked expression on his face, grabbing my shoulders on either side. "Wait, you let me walk out of the church without one?" he gasped in exaggerated fright.

As I rolled my eyes, our friends laughed, sputtered, and choked on champagne and wine. Myles dropped the frightened facade as Charlie chuckled and stared at the gathering.

"Still, though. It's a lot of suits. I wonder how many of them are still going to vote for this bullshit bill even after giving you shit-eating congrats at your own wedding."

"Oh, come on," I said with a sigh. "I know it's tense right now but really — this is a celebration. Can we relax for just a second before we run back into the trenches?"

Charlie looked at me and then gave me a half-smile. The expressions on our friends' faces made me wonder about what I'd said and whether or not I'd committed a leftist faux pas. After a further awkward pause, Myles frowned and then squeezed my hand again. "My beautiful husband has a point: what's the point of fighting if we can't also stop to enjoy the victories? We just got married, fuckers!"

As our gaggle cheered to that, someone slapped me across the back. "Son, I wanted to introduce you to the Governor."

I turned around to see my dad, double Proseccos across both hands, grinning ear to ear.

"We were saying hello to our friends first, dad."

I don't know if what I said registered or not, but my father looked across the room in confusion before zeroing in on Myles. "Where are your parents at, Myles?"

This time I was participating in the awkward discomfort of a thing-you-wish-you-hadn't-said. Charlie and Myles glanced at one another, then looked at me.

"They couldn't make it," I volunteered, trying to think of the most politically-expedient response that came to mind. I am my father's son, I suppose.

"They didn't want to make it," muttered Charlie, as Myles gently hissed between his teeth. None of us had met any of them; I just knew they existed, at some point, via the unhappy stories that Myles and Charlie have been willing to share.

Dad stared, confused, before he realised his fumble and took a tipsy step forward. "Ah, son. Screw them, then. I've always wanted another boy. Two boys!" Then he gestured at me and shrugged dismissively, slurring slightly. "This one got too spoiled as an only child. That's why I've always assumed Myles has money or something."

We all took a moment to register the joke before our spectrum of reactions erupted — me, horror; Myles and Charlie utterly losing their shit at the suggestion of coming from wealth; our other friends, who knew that I'd quietly and anonymously cleared out their gofundmes and other medical bills without ever admitting to it, joining in on the hilarity of me marrying my soulmate for his bank balance.

I know this makes me sound like a good person in the way that saccharine made New Coke taste palatable. But this is my reminiscence, and if I'm about to die I'll tell the story the way I want to.

We shook hands with a line of faces as the night wrapped up. I didn't know most of them — dad's assistant managed the majority of the invites, and the only people that mattered to Myles were the motley collection of his queer friends that I'd been introduced to once I started dating him.

"Why did you bring a fucking Republican here?" Charlie blurted out the first time we'd ever met each other: at a board game night four dates after my first-hookup-that-accidentally-became-more with Myles. I was uncomfortable and scared — and knowing I was going to a party with his trans brother and deeply leftist friends I felt a physical need to showcase myself as an ally. So I overcompensated, and turned up to the party with a bottle of $200 gin and enough resin badges to stand in as a PFLAG float.

The expensive gin didn't go far, nor did my institutional politics, but I walked out of that evening with a strange tickle at the edge of my life experience.

Like, for the first time in my life, I was starting to intrinsically realise that most people had an existence entirely outside of my own. I don't know what it says about my sheltered, Yale Law-sponsored, Upper West Side of Manhattan fuckery that it took until my mid-twenties to empathise with the difficult experiences of others, but as I heard in a mantra from one of my mother's yoga teachers once: we all climb the mountain at our own speed.

I'm not sure if I ever internalised his lessons about karma, but as I write down this little bit of contraband I certainly think I now know irony. One of the guards promised to get it to you — I think he didn't believe that I recognised his face, but I'll always remember how, after we'd been dating for a few months, you pointed out that I never made eye contact with hospitality staff. I was horrified, and certain that you were wrong, and you challenged me on naming just one article of clothing that the waiter at the trendy hipster bar was wearing. I couldn't — you knew I couldn't.

But now, I make a habit to take in the full measure of my jailers' faces, and I spend the brief minutes of neglect that they give me between their tortures listing in my head who will give me compensation first if I ever find myself in a position to enact revenge.

The reception peeled off and most of the stragglers took the hint and left. Charlie came up to us and gave Myles a hug. "I'm very happy for you."

"Thank you for coming," Myles said, screwing his face into the crook of his brother's neck.

"I'm sorry your parents don't accept you," I said awkwardly, immediately asking myself what the fuck was wrong with me as the word-vomit exited my lips. Myles and Charlie looked at me with the sort of disconnect as when you ask the Italian nonna for salt at the table, or refuse seconds after a Jewish dinner. I'm not proud to say I'm guilty of doing both of these already, and now I've added a lack of understanding for my ostracised queer husband and his trans brother to the mix.

"Aw — I love you, but you can never just be normal; jesus." Charlie laughed at my expense and walked off.

Their family didn't come because — where they're from — their mom and dad are the footsoldiers against Satan's battle over the righteous. Myles left home when he was a teenager and adopted his brother years later — his parents would have kicked the former out if Myles hadn't beat them to it by getting his own place. Then, he got custody of his younger brother once Charlie came out as trans; Charlie wasn't old enough to take care of himself on his own, and by then their parents assumed that both of their kids had been lost to the dark forces of the universe anyway.

"What a poor thing — I can't imagine a mother rejecting their child," mine had said after we — I — had convinced a deeply awkward and uncomfortable Charlie to come along for dinner with my family one evening. It was uneventful, but he took the first opportunity to leave the well-meaning but strange experience as soon as possible.

"I know you say she's a boy —"

"He," Myles and I said in unison — me, in outrage at the failure of demonstrative progressivism I'd grown up with; Myles in a world-weary disappointment as someone who'd made this correction many times before and was losing the energy to fight the fight every single time.

"Sorry — he — has such lovely eyes and skin. Are you sure he's made up... his whole mind about this 'gender' stuff? Hell — I've told your father about having lesbian thoughts in college. People change!" She even did air-quotes around gender.

Today, I watched them drag Charlie across the courtyard.

Nobody was paying enough attention to me, or they would have created a distraction to keep me from witnessing it. I've been told repeatedly how important it is for my "healing" that I let go of my life and memories from before. But though they'd shoved him into a dress, and haven't let him cut his hair in however long it's been since I've been kept here, I remember those lovely eyes and that lovely skin.

We hugged and kissed the last of dad's political cachet. Charlie and co asked if we wanted to go out clubbing — "They've finally reopened Nevermind; don't you want to see where Macauley Cuklin threw up?" — but I was triple parts tired, horny, and tiredly-horny from being around other people other than my now-husband.

Myles sensed my mood — he was always uncanny at doing that — and turned his brother down. "We're going to go consummate our marriage, to be honest."

Charlie rolled his eyes and turned to me. "Use lube. Big dicks run in our family."

Myles smirked. "His too, I figure." He made exaggerated waggly-eyes at the back of my dad's head as dad wobbled around in a less-than-discreet fashion.

Charlie feigned vomiting as our friends stumbled out the door. I smiled, thinking about how Karl Marx would have felt about a raucous marriage reception — replete with the politicians of his time drinking free champaign — but, then again, Ayn Rand died of cancer after getting treatment from the "socialists" she screeched about, so maybe hypocrisy doesn't have to be owned by conservatives alone.

"Is that so?" I asked Myles, pointedly ignoring his attempted provocation about my father with a wink.

"Which part?" he replied, innocently.

"Oh, about the big dick, obviously."

Myles scrunched his face in consideration, tossing his head to the side. "Well, wanting you to commiserate the marriage was definitely true." He cackled as he walked out of the reception hall.

"Hey! I wasn't done!"

He threw me a stupid, cheeky grin over his shoulder and waved.

"I wasn't done! My dick is big, right?"

"Son!" gasped my mother. Dad, cheeks flushed from more glasses of alcohol than was politically advisable, looked on the verge of telling me a related — and wholly inappropriate — anecdote about exactly this topic. I blushed bright red and ran after Myles just as he was stepping into one of dad's private cars.

"The epitome of working-class socialism partaking in this bourgeoise grandiosity?" I said, shoving him over across the back seat.

Myles stared at me with an incredulous expression. "There's no ethical consumption, blah blah, plus the A train isn't going express at this hour and I want you to fuck my brains out."

I threw a scared glance at the driver, who — whether from lack of hearing or professional tact — registered nothing of what my husband had just said. Myles regarded my face and for a split second, I lost him. He blanked, and as I stared into his eyes I could see his mind falling into a kind of disappointment and resignation that I had never experienced in the three years we'd dated. Not in me; in himself, for getting comfortable with this.

Then the mood flashed, and he grabbed my dick in my suit pants, and I forgot that there might have ever been a conflict for him to be at a wedding paid for on my dad's dime, and leave that wedding in my dad's car, with only his brother and small collection of their friends in attendance in the first place.

I know I've disappointed you many times over the years, but as I sit in this concrete, sterile room and think about my own disappointment, that moment comes back to me over and over.

Dad insisted on booking a hotel room for us. He said marriage meant fucking somewhere other than your usual place — joke's on you, dad, gay guys will do it anywhere we can get just enough privacy; as your driver probably let you know from us fooling around less than quietly in the back of the limo — so he booked us the Presidential Suite at the kind of Midtown hotel Myles never would have admitted to his friends that he'd stayed at.

"I love you," you said to me as you looked into my eyes and straddled my crotch.

"I do think about being the best kind of partner I can be — all the time."

"Yeah?" You leaned in to kiss me. I met your lips, and then pulled back to finish my point.

"We're just not at war anymore, though! Stonewall was decades ago."

You leaned up, looked at me, and sighed as if you were debating whether or not to ignore what I'd just said. "Not for Charlie. We can get married. But outside of New York — hell, in half of the country — we could get arrested if someone heard you call him my brother. And if this bill gets passed, he will lose his scholarship, and his civil servant job, and — fuck! They're scapegoating them, and if you don't see that they aren't going to stop there, I just don't —"

You stopped, took a deep breath and screwed your eyes shut with the expression you always made whenever you thought it was pointless to talk to me about something, then got off and rolled over onto the other side of the California king bed. In frustration, I threw myself in the opposite direction and turned away from you.

The hotel had left a TV on, or something — I remember half-listening to the news as I drifted off into an annoying, angry sleep full of spite towards your constant moral superiority.

"Breaking news — an update on the ongoing pandemic; efforts to quarantine the infection have failed in major cities in the US. We're waiting for briefings in New York and San Francisco —"

Hindsight and 20/20 and all that, but if I'd known that I'd never spend another night with you past that one, I'd like to think that I would've understood you differently than I did at the time.

But I didn't, and here we are.

Fingers crossed that you've got enough out of this to decode what you need to. I love you, and I will never forget the sight of your brother being dragged across the grass by hair far longer than he ever would have willingly kept it.

I'm sorry I let us down. Hopefully, you'll get the chance to rub it in my face sometime soon.

Note: I originally wrote this back in late 2023 but never published it anywhere because it's one of the more deeply personal and "me" bits of fiction writing I've created as well as being something that — I'd hoped — was too bleak and unnecessary to put into the universe. I hoped real life would turn out to be nicer than what my imagination had conjured up. Plus, anyone who knows me knows how much I deeply hate weddings.

Anyway, as we've seen lately, it hasn't turned out to be the case that the universe has gotten kinder. Now, I just hope I'm not setting the bar too low for the kind of cruelty that we are going to witness over the next few years.

Like a lot of my creative projects (though not usually what I've done for the vignettes), this story was originally an extremely vivid dream. It's often the case that I have tremendously cinematic, cognisant, and clear dreams — almost every night. It's a blessing creatively as much as it is a curse, though most of the time I very rarely remember more than a feeling and a vague series of impressions once I wake up. The ones that imprint themselves generally get worked into some sort of Thing.

What I wrote here was just the first half of that dream, and largely in the order that the scenes took place in my head. It jumped around from the "present" and through flashbacks of events months and years earlier, chronologically.

But there was more than what I wrote above — the dream continued the plot through the main character's incarceration as he was subjected to increasing levels of psychological and physiological torture by people who insisted that he was sick and needed to let go of the past in order to get better. Ostensibly this was under a public health directive as a flu went uncontrolled across the world, but the people accused of being carriers were always political dissidents, queer folks, artists, etc.

He was drugged and gaslit and repeatedly told that his recollections and feelings were perverse manipulations that he had to let go of; his steadfast refusal was inspired by Myles as he was certain that his husband wouldn't give in, either.

The final parts of the story involved the main character's father pulling the remaining bit of political favours he had to get his son out for a day trip; the main character was brought to a restaurant, so drugged up that he couldn't walk on his own, and met his parents — as well as Myles, who was there to introduce the main character to his new wife.

My dream ended shortly after this. The last scene was as the main character managed to find an opportunity to escape the place he was incarcerated inside of and was running towards a group of people who he hoped were his friends.

I chose, at the time, to end the story where I did because the first half of the plot my subconscious brain had invented felt dark enough already. I obviously still feel that way considering I chose to write this addendum instead of adding more of the story. But maybe I also didn't want to write more sadness into an already sad story.

However, I'm explaining the rest of the concept because as much as I might personally think of myself as the Myles in this, the dream took place through the first person perspective of the (still intentionally unnamed) main character, and I remember the emotional impact of walking into the cafe and being introduced to my husband's wife and feeling that sense of betrayal — against our relationship, but moreso his principles when it really mattered. I remember feeling hurt that someone I'd admired had appeared to cave for his own sake and safety.

Of course, this was all just a dream in the end.

But, I am worried that these are choices we're going to have to give thought to in real life much sooner than we're prepared to. Obviously, it's a worry that weighs on my mind since my brain conjured up an entire scenario to confront me with it.

Maybe that's the primary reason why I didn't want to publish this before — but have decided that it feels important to do so now. I've been both of these characters in real life; I can only hope that if, push comes to shove, the one that stands up for their principles even if it's not easy is the one that will come to the front.

Image: "Isometric Water Lilly" by Sephiroth-Art

Eze chewed his lower lip in concentration, every atom in his body focused on the tiny disc of light at his cross-legged feet. He narrowed his eyes cautiously, lines wrinkling across his forehead as he pushed that rigid focus into a physical manifestation within the centre of the conjuration plate itself: a pinprick of light sputtered into existence for just a moment, like a magnesium flare freshly lit. The spark flung copies of itself around the disc wildly and he held his breath in his chest lest even the act of respiration disrupt the process.

He watched with growing nervousness as the iridescent glints of energy cycled up and down the rainbow before finally settling on a hundred various shades of vibrant turquoise. He risked reaching out to touch the stone rim of the disc, driving his will into its rippling nucleus as his mind told the flicks how to reorient themselves as he desired. Slowly, as if the light were shards of metal and he was scraping a magnet across the surface, he commanded the energy at his feet into a rough sketch of the flower he remembered seeing earlier that morning.

Eze hadn't quite intended to be nosy, at least consciously, but when something seemed to catch Branden's interest he couldn't help but be interested in it in turn. He shyly peered over the other student's shoulder at the book in his lap, and his attention was arrested by the alluring blossom painstakingly drawn on its vellum pages.

"That looks very beautiful," Eze croaked, nerves making his voice sound quiet and ineffectual even in his own ears.

Branden looked up and smiled broadly, flashing white, neatly positioned teeth in greeting. If it had been an expression on anyone Eze wasn't so infatuated with, that physical embodiment of perfection might have made him nauseated.

"It's a caeruleum orchid," Branden said, thumping his finger against the bestiary. "They're all extinct now, unfortunately, but they were very popular when they still existed a few centuries ago — that's part of why you can't find any these days; the strain was over-farmed for dye and the population could no longer support reproduction."

Eze had little understanding of the words coming out of Branden's mouth, but he continued staring happily anyway. That had given him the idea for his current experiment, though: Branden seemed to like the flower, so Eze purloined a book on conjuration as well as the original bestiary from the Library and had gotten it in his head that if he managed to enchant one of the vanished plants into being it would summarily impress Branden and send him head over heels to the same degree that Eze already was.

That was the aspiration, at least.

Unfortunately, as soon as Eze began letting his mind wander, the skeleton of the conjuring began to waver and shake. "No, no!" he begged under his breath, gripping the disc harder and trying to reassert his willpower over the magic rapidly disintegrating in front of him. It was too late, however, and the coloured flint vanished in a puff of gentle brightness; the disc's surface returned to its inert, grey state and Eze stared down at it with abject disappointment.

"That was pretty, whatever it was going to be," said a voice behind his back. Eze whirled around with embarrassment, contorting his torso to hide the remains of the spell until he realised the speaker was his dormmate, Ceith. The older boy closed the door to their room, tossed his knapsack on his own bed and flopped gracelessly onto the furniture beside it. "What was it for?"

"A wasted gesture," Eze replied, disconsolate.

"Ah, I see," Ceith nodded with an air of sage understanding. "This is something involving Branden."

Eze rolled his eyes and pushed the disc away, taking a moment to arch his back and stretch his stiff legs. "The flower doesn't exist anymore, or something, so I was trying to make one." He gestured to the drawing of it on the open book at his left. "He really liked it."

"So you were going to give it to him as a gift, and he'd then see you in a brand new light and fall senselessly in love with you, yes?" Ceith gently teased.

Eze blushed hotly. "Don't mock me, please," he glowered, staring at his shoes.

The other boy's expression softened and he sat up on his bed. "Why don't you just tell him how you feel?" he asked gently.

"Some of us aren't as confident as you are," Eze mumbled in reply.

Both youths stared at the stone floor of their dorm room in awkward silence for several moments before Ceith cleared his throat. "Would you like some help with the spell, then? Conjurings are trickier if you're trying to recall the base image without a physical example, and two people can hold a sketch stable for longer."

Eze looked over at his dormmate in surprise before a small smile spread across his lips. "That would be nice, thank you."

Ceith nodded, pushing himself off of the bed and landing opposite Eze on the ground. He arranged his lanky limbs in a more comfortable configuration before looking down at the conjuration disc that waited halfway between the pair of friends.

"Right, then — let's get started."

Image: "Concrete Jungle" by BoldCat

I cleared my throat and tilted my head to the right, slightly lifting my chin and projecting my voice to the ceiling. It was unnecessary, I knew: the room's microphones would pick up near sub-vocalisation levels of speech, but it was a nervous habit I couldn't seem to break. Despite years doing it, I'd never quite shaken off the unsettling feelings that came from talking with the dead.

"Inspector Smith, beginning Memory Autopsy for deceased #323477 — identified as Mr. Daryn Bright, twenty-six years old at the time of his death approximately fifteen hours ago. Preliminary cause," I said, glancing briefly at the angry, blotchy bruising around his throat, "believed to be strangulation, likely by hand. No other signs of injury present; no DNA evidence under victim's fingernails, no overt signs of struggle. Toxicology came back negative for alcohol, tranquillisers, or other substances. Given the anomalous nature of the murder, victim was referred to Memory for further investigation."

I looked at the four diaphanous apparitions hovering in a semi-circle about ten metres away from me. "Joining me remotely are Constables Hohnke, Sandes, and Johansson, as well as Inspector General Lammerts. Please provide verbal acknowledgement."

"Acknowledged," the four said in unison, communicating from whatever offices they worked out of across the globe. Given the slim window of time in which a Memory Autopsy could be performed, it behooved having facilities set up as local to population centres as was possible. I've never met any of them in person — and realistically, it was likely that I never would.

"Acknowledgement received and logged," I responded. "DELTA, commence cognition revival."

"Initiating revival," replied a tinny, inhuman voice seemingly coming from everywhere all around me. The facility's synthetic intelligence handled almost all aspects of this process, but communing with the dead did require a human touch. A somewhat unique touch, at that: these days we understood the electromagnetic fields radiating around one another and knew more about the invisible communications we'd unknowingly been broadcasting since before humans first figured out how to harness flame. In a less-enlightened era, these were talked about as auras or other pseudo-scientific terms, but now we had actual understanding about the subconscious network humanity had been perpetually jacked into under our noses all along.

But for all our species-level connectedness, people like me were fairly rare; people like me who had varying degrees of control over the nature of what we broadcast — and what signals we received from others. The sort of folks who always know when someone is lying to them, or if something is wrong emotionally when all outward signs seem fine, or cruised by as the life of the party but felt emotionally drained and needed a quiet, dark room away from the silent noise of other minds as soon as they get home.

I closed my eyes as DELTA began the procedure. The already-dim lighting in the refrigerated, sterile room flickered almost imperceptibly, and the walls began to vibrate from a low hum. Electrodes on my temples and wrists tingled slightly as the machinery surrounding me and the corpse were activated.

Everyone had their own process for getting into the right state of mind for an autopsy: I pictured myself falling into a dark ocean backwards and let the void swallow me until my breathing slowed to a steady, calm rhythm.

"Link confirmed," DELTA said after a moment of meditative silence. I opened my eyes and saw the victim's home manifested holographically around me as his last minutes alive were drawn out from the dead grey matter inside his skull.

"Constables, can you confirm that you're seeing the live link?" I asked. Again in unison, the ghostly quartet acknowledged that they were seeing the same thing I was. I gave a short nod to myself and took a deep breath. "DELTA, bring Mr. Bright back to life."

The machines around us shifted pitch and the walls shook with an intensity that would be concerning had I not done this process dozens of times in the past. Then, suddenly, a new ghost manifested in the room: hovering just above the corpse, a projection of Daryn's self-image appeared in front of me.

"Daryn, can you hear me?" I asked the apparition.

"Where am I? I'm very cold," came the response from the same speaker system that DELTA communicated to me through. Daryn wasn't actually alive, of course, and I was merely activating dying synapses firing on borrowed time.

"Daryn, I need you to think of the last thing you can remember. What comes to mind?"

"Where am I?" the corpse repeated, ignoring my question. I frowned to myself, pursing my lips as I looked at the tablet in my lap. DELTA was reading little subconscious activity in the victim's mind: whilst everyone handled their death in their own unique way, with some victims rejecting their final reality quite violently, me asking him to recall his last moments should have surfaced something even if he didn't want to remember anything at all.

Conscious of the small window of time that was available to us, I pressed on. "You've died, Daryn. Someone murdered you, and I need your help to find who did it."

The walls began to shake even worse than before, and for the first time I felt a gnawing sense of unease. "What? No — I'm not dead. I'm right here. I'm right here!" He began repeatedly screaming the last phrase as the high-pitched hum from the equipment nearby threatened to rupture my eardrums.

"DELTA, put him back to sleep," I called out over the noise and his screaming. At once, the din ceased and the projection above the body vanished. My ears rung in the silence.

"DELTA, reset his memory back to the state it was in when he was revived, then bring him back again."

"Confirmed," chirped the facsimile. Seconds later the projection returned.

As did the screaming.

"DELTA, that's enough!" I shouted and once more Mr. Bright was turned off. I looked at the tablet screen and confirmed with my own eyes that even though his mental state had been reset, somehow he retained memory of what I'd told him. I'd never encountered anything like this before.

There was one other tool available to me. It wasn't unusual for a particularly violent death to reject an autopsy — though to this degree was outside of my experience — and a mind could be overridden and directly controlled if a cooperative conversation was beyond the victim. The downside is that doing so would burn out the victim's synapses entirely, so it was a last-ditch tool with a one-time use.

"Well, you saw what happened," I said to my colleagues. "I don't think we have any choice but to use an override."

The flickering apparition of Constable Hohnke frowned. "Are you being too hasty, Smith? Why don't you try interviewing him again." The others nodded and murmured agreement.

I grit my teeth. Every minute this dragged on was another minute that the victim's mind deteriorated and our already-slim chance at getting information out of him was reduced. Nevertheless, I couldn't use the override without a majority vote of everyone present. I instructed DELTA to try to reset his memories and revive him a third time and once more the pained screams of the dead man assaulted my ears.

"Very well," said Hohnke. "I think it's clear that we're not going to get through to him using gentler means."

The Inspector General tutted and shook her head. "Such a waste."

"All in favour?" I asked the group. The vote was unanimous.

"DELTA, initiate memory override. I will assume direct control."

"Initiating override in ten seconds, Inspector Smith."

I closed my eyes again and slowed my breathing to slip back into my trance state. DELTA continued to count down as I followed along in my own head and waited for the connection to begin. When it happened, I felt a surge of electricity through the contacts on my skin and my mind's eye exploded with someone else's memories.

"DELTA, confirm recording," I said in real life. The AI chirped back an affirmative. With my eyes still closed and knowing that what I was seeing was simultaneously projected to the room — and, by extension, my colleagues — I "looked" around.

From the crime-scene photos I'd already viewed, I knew that I was inside Mr. Bright's apartment. There wasn't anything particularly unusual about it, and he lived in what was an averagely boring sort of apartment for single people his age. The dead man, now resurrected to the last minutes of his corporeal existence, sat on the couch reading a book. I squinted at the cover as the book's title shifted into focus — "I, Robot."

Standing in place at the centre of the living room I passed my attention over everything I could see nearby. Who knew what details would prove important, and I knew this recording would be poured over by the other investigators involved in the case. As Daryn continued reading, unaware of my silent presence inside of his mind, a chime went off from an intercom panel in his apartment. Daryn closed his book and walked over to the panel. His body language didn't suggest that he was surprised, so this visitor was expected. I looked at the intercom and focused on the tiny LED screen above the call box, but whomever it was stood too close to the camera to make any identifiable details out. Daryn thumbed a button and a green checkmark appeared on the screen. The visitor moved out of the frame, and Daryn walked down a hallway and out of my view.

Locked in my vantage point in the centre of his living room, I couldn't see where the victim was now. "DELTA, bring me closer to him."

After a second, my perspective shifted and I was standing in a corridor as he walked towards the front door of his flat. Daryn unlocked the door and opened it slightly, leaving it ajar before he returned back to the living room and passed through my projection as if I was invisible. I instructed DELTA to shift my position so that I could both see Daryn and also had line of sight to the front door. Then, I waited for this unknown visitor to show themselves.

It didn't take long. The door creaked open and, much to my surprise, a young woman stepped through the threshold. She was average height, with brown hair pulled up into a tight bun. Attractive enough in a conventional sort of way. She had on a black t-shirt and jeans with heavy black leather boots on her feet. Her stance was confident and assertive — the first word that came to mind was "soldier."

And I had the uneasy feeling that she was somehow staring directly at me.

The woman took several purposeful strides into the apartment, closing and locking the door behind her. Then she turned to face me and there was no doubt about it — somehow, this person knew I was there despite being a disembodied presence within the memory of a dead man.

"Olle. Lovely to meet you, finally. Well, as much of a meeting as this can be."

"How —" I started, confused as to what was going on. The hair on my arms stood on end and my heart started racing with fear.

She held up her hand. "No, don't speak. Our time here is short anyway, but I've heard so much about you. We'll be meeting properly very soon."

The stranger's mouth twisted into a grin that was all teeth and held a feral sort of violence behind it. Then, without warning, she launched herself at me with her hands balled into fists. I flinched and yelled out reflexively as some sort of force slammed into my body. Back in the real world I fell back from my chair, electrodes ripping themselves from my skin painfully as I landed on my side. There was an electrical pop and I smelled the acrid smoke of burning plastic as something in the room sizzled and flared up. I didn't need to look at the tablet or ask DELTA what I already knew to be true — Daryn Bright was truly dead now.

I very, very sporadically have published some short stories online.

I call them "vignettes" and have to credit a good friend of mine, Dang, for giving me the initial inspiration almost a decade ago. They shared some of their own stuff on social media and I thought it was a lovely way to work on something low-stakes unrelated to an existing creative project of mine — particularly if I was feeling writer's block already.

Mostly, I've shared these on Facebook and Tumblr, but now that I have recreated my own space here I'm going to start slowly publishing them once again.

The point of the writing exercise is very simple: I trawl around online for an image that resonates and when I find one, I write a short story that's been inspired by it.

(Mostly; the one example that ran counter to this is the one I'm going to share first — even though it is not chronological in writing or publishing date. This one was a dream I had that was so vivid in nature that I wrote the story originally and then found an image after the fact. But, most of the time, it was the other way around. This first one is also, by far, the very longest.)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy them. I'll add to this category over time, but please leave a comment with your thoughts and let me know if any of them resonate with you the same way.