Knock, knock.

Kyle looked up from the blocks in his hand. He had been building skyscrapers on the scratchy psychedelic rug in the living room. He had been thinking of toppling them like a dinosaur on TV, but a knock distracted him.

He paused for a moment, then started building with his blocks again. The sweet, sappy smell felt nice in his nose for some reason. He grabbed a little red car next to him and raced it around the giant streets of Kyleville.

Knock, knock.

He stopped again and looked up. He had heard some sort of knock from the other room. Kyle leaned forward and, when his butt got off the ground, he used his hands to stand up. His legs were still a bit shaky - this whole walking thing was still new to him.

Knock, knock.

Kyle walked - more like hobbled - to the hallway leading to the front door. He looked down the hallway both ways, the food place on one side, the door to...

Read Voyager 1, the prelude to this story.

They found it. Floating in the dark abyss, light years from civilization, they found it. It had been their last hope, this small box with a semi-circle antenna nestled on top. Hundreds of years ago, they had received the first signal from it. From there they mapped it, and began to zero-in on its location. Generations of scientists had come and gone, all to reach this single object floating in space. It was the only shimmering glimpse of hope they had anymore.

Their home was now the stars - confined within the walls they built. Stories of their planet had drifted into fable, then myth, until the single colony ship became the only home that had ever existed. Photos of their distant stellar home existed, but with each passing generation fewer and fewer archaeologists could recall what they were looking at.

The entire ship stood still as a...

Mara Flaherty and Joseph Bruck had worked side-by-side on the Voyager 1 project since they joined up in the early 2000s. Though they grew up on separate shores of the US, their lives seemed parallel: they both grew up with the dream of space in their minds as children. They both attended major universities in the hopes of joining the corps of their prestigious super heroes floating 400km above the surface of the Earth. Both suffered a traumatic mid-life accident ending these dreams and placing them firmly on the ground.

Middle-aged, they still shared that child-like spark of wonder and surprise at the majesty of space - even if they were staring at an early 1990s computer screen spewing out binary digits that only four months ago they began to understand.

They had followed a series of erratic nonsense data points back more than 40 years and compiled the adjoining binary together...

The wind cut at our faces - sharp as our blades’ edges. It had been two months on the moors and our furs had been saturated with ice and snow. They weighed heavily on our shoulders.

We marched against the whipping wind and biting rain. The sun only showed itself nearly an hour a day during the Long Winter - a darkness that seems complete. It never showed its face long enough to warm our bones. Cold. Endless cold.

Camp was built when we could walk no more. Our numbers were half of what they had been when we left. At first we picked up our brethren, carried them on horses, and when most of the horses died, on our backs. Too many stopped moving or died too fast. So we left them in the snow.

The hardiest of men felled several trees to build a giant blaze for warmth. For so long we had marched in secrecy, hiding ourselves from our enemies. The blaze burns bright - it keeps us from death...

The amber eyes of the singer glistened, her voice swelled hypnotically as she sang a passionately entrancing melody. The notes bespoke of lost intimacy, yet intimated a hidden volatility. Her enigmatic tone touched their souls. Her words swirled off her tongue like a troublesome fog on a desolate harbor. Patrons materialized from the haze, blank expressions and empty eyes carried haphazardly to their seats. Each word’s rise and fall tantalized. Emotional crests, neither good nor inherently bad, swelled as a tumultuous ocean ready to engulf them.

Oliver wobbled momentarily, then regained his footing. The pier rocked as his boat had the past few days; he had felt a storm brewing: sailor’s intuition. As he neared the glorified shanty overhanging the bay, he started to whisper the first step: “I admit I was powerless…” then the dream-like melody flooded to him. Unsure, he stood still and...

Start at Chapter 1 or read the last chapter here.

“Hello, Fairweather.”

A single fluorescent light in the ceiling flickered on directly above Fae; she stood still, back pressed against the locked door. The darkness was piercing and the voice speaking to her was booming, almost too powerful to be in the room. Beneath the booming, Fae was able to hear a nearly inaudible tone like a ringing in her ear.

“I’ve been watching you,” the voice continued. “I know who you are.”

Fae took a step away from the door, moving into the darkness. As a foot entered the dark, the light she had been under turned off, replaced by the one she was now under. She stepped sideways and the light turned off, another picking her up.

The ring in her ear intensified, bouncing around in her head. A subtle headache began to swell behind her eyes and branched through her head.

“I know what you are,” a pause, “and...

Nigredo

Oren Caraday huddled over a bubbling instrument. A viscous black liquid bubbled and emitted fumes that had rankled Oren’s nose long ago. He fine tuned the burner beneath the bulbous shaped glass holding the liquid and watched a few moments longer. Satisfied, he moved across the lab, kicking crumpled pieces of paper out of his way. He had knocked the waste bin over several days ago; he paid it no mind.

On another bench heaped with glassware and metal fixtures, a clear bluish liquid slowly boiled. This particular mixture had been in the making for several weeks. It was the combination of information and inferences gleaned from three separate untitled texts of varying quality with a dash of Oren’s own ingenuity. Next to the carefully calculated mixture was a lump of obsidian. More accurately, it was a Tetrahedron, each side measuring precisely ten centimeters. It was carefully...

He sat on the ground on a hill. It was not a large hill. It was not quite a small hill either. It was, simply, just a hill - a slight mound of dirt rising slightly higher than another mound of equally dirty dirt. The point wasn’t that he was on a hill. The point was what he saw from his hill - for he liked to think it was his hill.

Aloft, he would probably say, nearly a hand’s width above the horizon was the golden, burning globe of bronze. He couldn’t help look at it. It was stunning. Then he would blink and in the sudden darkness, the burnt orb would flutter a pinkish purple, bouncing higher in his vision the more he blinked. It gave him a headache looking at the sun, but it was comforting; when the sun went down he would miss it.

He came here a lot, this dirty hill. It was a nice hill that lifted him above the runners and the blacktop ringing the pond below. Up here, nobody ran...

Atop a low hill, under the shade of an ancient tree, sat a fully-armored knight propped uncomfortable against the marred bark. His legs spread out in front of him haphazardly and his shoulders slumped with ease. The knight’s helmet rested at the bottom of the hill where it had rolled to; the visor was open, drinking the refreshing clear water of the stream. Every now and then a crimson or gold leaf would float into it, then lazily out again.

A few sparrows flitting from branch to branch, chirped playfully in the tree’s canopy above him. The wind moved softly over the rolling hills towards the setting autumn sun, hoping to catch summer’s last breaths. It carried the sweet smell of lavender and the soothing rustle of the sea of grass. The knight took a breath haggardly, choked for a moment, and sputtered, coughing.

The knight’s armor was freshly polished from the day before. Little dust...

I was surprised to see you in here in your pinstripe suit. I doubt you had much else to wear, but I was surprised nonetheless.

“You and I, we go way back,” I started. “I thought I knew you, pal. We worked the beat for years and I had no idea you had it in you.”

You sat there quietly, barely making eye contact. You looked distracted. I supposed I’d be distracted being in prison too. You pulled out a notebook. I guess they let prisoners have notebooks and pencils these days.

We stared murderers down almost everyday here, but it’s hard to look your partner in the eye knowing the stuff he’s done. “A little girl, eh? Why’d you do it, pal?”

You looked solemn. I would look solemn too if I had been a part of that grizzly affair.

“You murdered a little twelve-year-old, innocent girl after keeping her for a month in your basement. Sliced her up with broken shards of Christmas ornaments. What...